Submitted Name Revision History

Roman family name of disputed origin. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is from Latin #favere# "to favor"; Ernest Klein says, by dissimilation from *#fovonius#, literally "the warming wind", from #fovere# "to warm". In Roman mythology Favonius was the personification of the west wind, equivalent to the Greek god ZEPHYROS. Marcus Favonius was a politician during the fall of the Roman Republic, and the basis for a character in Shakespeare's tragedy 'Julius Caesar' (1599), i.e., the unnamed Poet who appears in Act IV Scene III.