Why is National Pamela Day on August 22?

No source gives a reason. The date is consistent across the posts and listings that mark it, but nothing on record explains how it was chosen.

Who started National Pamela Day?

Nobody has been identified. There is no proclamation, sponsoring organisation or first-observance record, and the day reaches most people through calendar listings and search results.

Does the name Pamela really mean all sweetness?

That is a guess rather than a finding. The reading comes from combining the Greek words for all and for honey, and the Online Etymology Dictionary calls the derivation conjecture.

National Pamela Day

Next celebratedSunday, August 22, 2027

Pamela was invented before it was anybody's, and nobody settled how to say it: Sidney stressed the second syllable, and Fielding had a pedlar report both versions in use. August 22 takes it either way.

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Last updated September 6, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?

YEARLY DATEAugust 22

OBSERVED INInternationally

CATEGORYNames

ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY

Not documented

FIRST OBSERVED

Not documented

HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

Every date behind the name is documented. The date of the day is not.

Who put National Pamela Day on August 22 is not on any record located: no proclamation, no organisation, no first observance, and no stated reason for the date. A full-text search of the US Federal Register returns nothing under the name. What does exist is circulation, in calendar listings and in posts from Pamelas and from a London newsroom marking the date.

+ Know the story? Submit a founder Help us complete this holiday

INTRO

Stolen word for word from a heathen fiction

National Pamela Day carries a name that was fiction long before it was anybody's. In October 1649, John Milton accused the prayer book published after the execution of Charles I of printing a prayer "stol'n word for word from the mouth of a Heathen fiction". The fiction was Pamela, a character Philip Sidney had invented for a prose romance.

Milton did not expect to be believed, so he told readers where to look. He sent them to page 248 of the third book of Sidney's Arcadia, to set Pamela's prayer beside the one the king handed Dr Juxton immediately before his death.

That is a long way from where most Pamelas meet their own name. The version that reached them is counted decade by decade, and in the United States it peaked in the 1950s. The Social Security Administration counted 237,398 girls given the name in that decade alone.

ORIGINS

Pamela Day history

INTRODUCTION

Philip Sidney wrote for his own amusement and for that of his close friends. Britannica records that he had completed a version of his prose romance Arcadia by 1580, and that he allowed none of his writing to reach a printer while he lived. Somewhere inside it he needed a name for a princess, and he made one up.

That is very nearly the whole record of the coinage. Reference works agree that Pamela did not exist before Sidney, and disagree about almost everything after that, starting with what he wanted it to mean.

CHAPTER 01

The name outlived the man before it reached a reader

Sidney died in 1586; the revised Arcadia was not printed until 1590, four years after him. A further edition in 1593 finished the story using books from his original draft. That original draft waited a great deal longer; its complete text was not printed until 1926, by which time the name inside it was finally becoming popular.

CHAPTER 02

A printer turns the name into a product

Samuel Richardson published Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded on 6 November 1740. Britannica describes it as a story about a servant and the man who, failing to seduce her, marries her. The heroine is a fifteen-year-old servant, and the story arrives as her letters.

The country bought it and then quarrelled about it. A second edition was advertised in the London Daily Advertiser on 14 February 1741, barely three months behind the first.

By April a newspaper advertisement was offering ladies a Pamela fan, engraved by what it called the best masters. A clergyman named Benjamin Slocock had already recommended the novel from the pulpit of St Saviour's Church in Southwark. One later scholar raised the possibility that he had been paid to.

Fielding's burlesque, An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews, reached the shops on 4 April 1741. That was five months after the book it was mocking.

CHAPTER 03

Nobody could agree how to say it

The stress has moved since. Hanks and Hodges' Dictionary of First Names records that in Sidney's verse the name is stressed on the second syllable, and that nothing survives to show where he got it. Fielding put the confusion into a novel; in Joseph Andrews, a pedlar identifies a family by their daughter, who has "a very strange name", and notes that some pronounced it one way and some the other.

CHAPTER 04

Six Pamelas at a Boca Raton brunch

Which brings the story to August 22, where the documentation runs out; nobody has claimed National Pamela Day. What exists instead is people: a public post on 21 August 2025 announced the day and admitted, in the same breath, that its author had learned of it by looking it up. He went on to describe a brunch his wife had convened at a Boca Raton restaurant in 2020.

Six women named Pamela turned up to that one. MyLondon marked the date with a note to all the Pams and Pamelas out there.

TIMELINE

Timeline

Sidney finishes his Arcadia

Philip Sidney completes a version of the prose romance that contains the invented name Pamela, and lets no printer near it.

The name reaches print

The revised Arcadia is printed four years after Sidney's death, putting the coinage in front of readers for the first time.

Milton names Pamela in a pamphlet

Eikonoklastes accuses the executed king's prayer book of lifting Pamela's prayer straight out of Sidney's romance.

Richardson publishes Pamela

Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded goes on sale on 6 November and becomes the publishing sensation of the season.

Shamela answers back in April

Fielding's burlesque appears on 4 April, and a fan engraved with scenes from the novel goes on sale the same month.

The original Arcadia reaches print

The complete text of Sidney's first version, in manuscript since the 1580s, is printed for the first time.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Pamela Day by the Numbers

13th: Pamela's peak US rank, 1950s
1.203%: Pamela's share of 1950s US girl births
17th: Pamela's peak England and Wales rank, 1944
576,237: US girls named Pamela, 1940s to 1980s
12: Highmore paintings of Richardson's Pamela

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love National Pamela Day

MEANING

Nobody wrote down what Sidney meant it to mean.

The usual gloss, all sweetness, comes from stitching the Greek words for all and for honey together, and the Online Etymology Dictionary labels that derivation conjecture rather than record. Sidney left no note explaining the name, so every Pamela told what hers means is being told a guess.

LITERATURE

A candidate for the first English novel

Britannica notes that Richardson's book is often credited with being the first English novel, an argument that turns on how the word novel is defined. Behind the Name records that Pamela only came into use as a given name after that book appeared.

REACH

The name outlasted its own book

Twenty years after publication a bookseller was still pushing a novel subtitled Pamela the Second, purely to borrow the recognition. A critic writing in the Monthly Review in December 1752 could still use Pamela as shorthand and expect readers to follow.

GOOD TO KNOW

National Pamela Day Around the World

Spain

the heroine became an ordinary noun, and the Real Academia Española still defines a pamela as a low-crowned, wide-brimmed straw hat worn by women in summer, crediting Richardson's novel in the etymology

Italy

the Vocabolario Treccani carries the same word for a ribbon-tied straw hat, and traces the name's 18th-century spread to Richardson and to Goldoni's two comedies, Pamela nubile and Pamela maritata

France

an almost identical vogue ran in France, producing Boissy's Pamela en France, La Chaussée's stage version, and Godard d'Aucour's La Deroute des Pamela

England and Wales

the official decennial list has Pamela absent in 1904 and 1914, then arriving at 60th in 1924, while the American decade tables show nothing until the 1940s

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate National Pamela Day

Ask a Pamela which syllable she uses

There is an older answer than the one she will give you. Sidney stressed his invention on the second syllable. The standard modern pronunciation puts the weight on the first.

ORDER

Order a pamela in a Spanish shop

Ask for one and a hat arrives. The Real Academia Española defines the word as a wide-brimmed straw hat for summer, and files the novel's heroine in the etymology.

READ

Read the book that mocked the book

Fielding's Shamela turns Richardson's virtuous servant into a fortune hunter coldly working her employer towards a wedding. Britannica calls it the first of several books to burlesque the novel.

STAND

Stand in front of a Highmore

Joseph Highmore's canvases from the novel are split three ways between London, Cambridge and Melbourne. Whichever city you are nearest, four of them are within reach.

GATHER

Gather every Pamela you know

It is the one gathering anyone has been documented holding for the name. Book a table, invite the Pamelas and the Pams, and find out how many of them share a birth decade.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Pamela Day?

1 / 8

Who invented the name Pamela?

Answer

No. It is an unofficial observance with no legal standing located, and a full-text search of the US Federal Register returns no documents under the name.

COLOPHON

Sources

How we know what’s on this page. References, not endorsements.

18sources

11primary records

10independently dated

Primary records

The John Milton Reading Room, Dartmouth College1649

Eikonoklastes (1649), full text

Milton's original-spelling attack on the prayer book published after the execution of Charles I, including the charge that one prayer was taken word for word from Sidney's Pamela.