National Veronica Day

Onomastics tells it the other way round. The Online Etymology Dictionary files Veronica as a variant of the Greek Berenike, classical Pherenike, "bringer of victory", and calls the vera icon reading a folk etymology.

So does Behind the Name, which files it as a Latin alteration of Berenice, with the spelling influenced by the church phrase rather than drawn from it.

The apocryphal text leans that way too. Its woman already carries the name and meets no image, and etymonline notes that in the East she was identified as Berenike from an early date.

The name itself travelled well whichever order is right. Behind the Name records that in English it "was not common until the 19th century, when it was imported from France and Scotland."

The observance is the newest layer and the thinnest. Listing sites carry National Veronica Day against 14 October without naming anyone behind it, and one of them prints a founding year on the same page where it answers that the founder is not known.

So the day sits at the end of a long chain of borrowings. A Greek name became a Latin one, the Latin phrase and the woman fused into a single figure, and the figure became a date that nobody has claimed.