Holiday Calendar

National Vanessa Day

Next celebratedSaturday, March 20, 2027

Nobody knows what Esther Van Homrigh looked like: no eighteenth-century portrait said to be her was taken from life. National Vanessa Day belongs to the name coined for her, later given to a butterfly genus.

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Last updated September 5, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?
YEARLY DATEMarch 20
OBSERVED INUnited States
CATEGORYNames
ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY
Not documented
FIRST OBSERVED
Not documented
HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

Everything about the name is dated except its day.

No founder, proclamation, or first-observance record for National Vanessa Day has been identified, and no source explains why it falls on March 20. The day circulates informally, and outlets including Mirror Celebrity News have marked it on the date.

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

Jonathan Swift built a name to keep a secret

Jonathan Swift needed a word that only he and one other person would understand. He appears to have assembled one around 1711, out of Esther Vanhomrigh's own name, and used it in letters he did not want read. National Vanessa Day now belongs to everyone who ended up carrying it.

Swift got the privacy he wanted, and rather more of it than he intended. What Esther Van Homrigh looked like is not really known. Her biographer notes that several eighteenth-century portraits are said to represent her, though none seems to have been taken from life.

The name outlived the face by three centuries. It went on to become a butterfly genus, a Pulitzer-winning opera, and eventually an ordinary American first name.

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ORIGINS

Vanessa Day history

INTRODUCTION

Esther Van Homrigh met Jonathan Swift in London in 1707, after her family moved there from Dublin. Her father was a wealthy merchant of Dutch extraction who had served as the city's lord mayor. That Dutch surname was the unusual thing about her, and it was the part Swift took.

Swift wrote Cadenus and Vanessa for her in 1713, and he gave himself a code name in it too. Cadenus is an anagram of decanus, the Latin for dean. He was Dean of St Patrick's in Dublin.

CHAPTER 01

The poem she never saw in print

Swift had reason to keep the whole thing quiet. He was also attached to Esther Johnson, the woman he called Stella, and he wanted the relationship with Van Homrigh kept from public scrutiny.

When her mother died in 1714, she followed Swift to Ireland much to his dismay. She set up house at Celbridge, Co. Kildare, and died there in June 1723.

The poem stayed unpublished until 1726. By then the private code had an audience it was never built for.

Her will did the rest of the talking. She cut Swift out of it and left half her fortune to the philosopher George Berkeley, a man she barely knew.

CHAPTER 02

A word with no owner

Once the poem was public, the name stopped belonging to anybody in particular. It took a very long time to catch on. Vanessa was still not much used in the United States before 1950.

CHAPTER 03

Whose idea was March 20?

National Vanessa Day is the one part of the story that arrives unsigned. The coinage, the printing and the genus can all be dated, but the observance has no traceable founder and no stated reason for its place on the calendar. It gets marked anyway, including by Mirror Celebrity News in March 2026.

TIMELINE

Timeline

Esther Van Homrigh is born

She arrives in Dublin on 14 February, eldest child of a merchant who would serve as the city's lord mayor.

Swift writes the poem

Cadenus and Vanessa puts the invented name on paper, addressed to the woman it was built from.

The poem reaches print

Cadenus and Vanessa is published for the first time, three years after its subject's death.

A butterfly genus takes the name

Fabricius erects the genus Vanessa in Illiger's Magazin fuer Insektenkunde, where it remains an accepted name.

Millais paints an imagined Vanessa

John Everett Millais finishes a portrait of a woman no painter had seen; it hangs at Sudley House in Liverpool.

Barber's opera wins the Pulitzer

Vanessa, with a libretto by Gian-Carlo Menotti, takes the Pulitzer Prize for Music after premiering at the Metropolitan Opera House.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love National Vanessa Day

RECORD

A made-up word that ended up in the birth records.

Vanessa can be traced to one writer, one woman and one poem. From there the record follows it into a butterfly genus and into decades of American birth data.

SCIENCE

The name does real work in biology

Vanessa is the accepted genus for 30 butterfly species. Researchers tracked one of them, the painted lady, crossing at least 4,200 km of open Atlantic.

MEMORY

Celbridge still keeps her name in public

The town where Esther Van Homrigh died runs an annual arts festival named for her and Swift. Its 2026 programme ran in July.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Vanessa Day by the Numbers

65,731
US girls named Vanessa, 1980s
48
Peak US decade rank, 1980s
178
US decade rank at 1950s debut
16 of 22
US name books printing 'butterfly'

MYTH VS FACT

Common Misconceptions

The myth

Vanessa is a Greek word meaning 'butterfly'.

The truth

There is no such Greek word. Swift built the name from Esther Vanhomrigh's surname and first name, and the butterfly idea reached American name books through a single 1933 dictionary of given names.

The myth

The butterfly genus Vanessa was named after Swift's character.

The truth

It may have been, but nobody has shown it. The onomastician who argues for the link calls his own evidence largely circumstantial, and the Online Etymology Dictionary says Fabricius chose the name for unknown reasons.

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate National Vanessa Day

EDITOR'S PICK

Read the poem that invented the name

Swift's poem is where the made-up word first reached print. Reading it gets you as close as anyone can now to the moment the name went public.

ASK

Ask a Vanessa what her name means

American baby-name books spent decades telling her it means butterfly. The real answer is a Dublin surname and a secret Swift was trying to keep.

WATCH

Watch for a painted lady

Vanessa cardui belongs to the genus that borrowed the name. Researchers have tracked the species crossing an ocean without stopping to feed.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Vanessa Day?

1 / 8

Who invented the name Vanessa?

Answer

No. It is an unofficial observance with no legal standing, and searches of federal records turned up no resolution, proclamation or statute designating it.

COLOPHON

Sources

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

12sources
8primary records
10independently dated
Primary records
US Social Security Administration
Popular Baby Names: Top Names of the 1980s
Decade rankings and birth counts for US girls' names, Vanessa included.
View source
Texas Legislature Online2023
H.B. No. 2248, 88th Legislature, Enrolled
The Texas act designating September 30 as Vanessa Guillen Day.
View source
GBIF2026
Vanessa Fabricius, 1807
The accepted taxonomic record for the butterfly genus and its 30 species.
View source
Nature Communications2024
A trans-oceanic flight of over 4,200 km by painted lady butterflies
Evidence that painted ladies crossed the Atlantic from West Africa to South America.
View source
The Pulitzer Prizes1958
1958 Pulitzer Prizes
The prize citation for Samuel Barber's opera Vanessa.
View source
Art UK1868
Vanessa, by John Everett Millais
Collection record for the 1868 painting held at Sudley House, Liverpool.
View source
Swift and Vanessa Festival2026
Programme of Festival Events
The Celbridge festival's own programme for its 2026 edition.
View source
Mirror Celebrity News2026-03-20
It's National Vanessa Day
A UK newspaper account marking the observance on the day itself.
View source
Additional coverage
Dictionary of Irish Biography2009
Van Homrigh (Vanhomrigh), Esther (Hester)
Scholarly life of Swift's Vanessa, from her Dublin birth to her will.
View source
Names: A Journal of Onomastics1993
How Vanessa Became a Butterfly: A Psychologist's Adventure in Entomological Etymology
Cleveland Kent Evans traces the false 'Greek for butterfly' meaning to its source.
View source
Online Etymology Dictionary
Vanessa
Entry on the coinage, the Cadenus anagram, and the genus name's unexplained choice.
View source
Behind the Name2026-05
Meaning, origin and history of the name Vanessa
Name reference listing Finland's February 25 Vanessa name day.
View source
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