Jehovahn.

Etymology: The English and common European representation, since the 16th cent., of the Hebrew divine name Yhwh . This word (the ‘sacred tetragrammaton’) having come to be considered by the Jews too sacred for utterance, was pointed in the Old Testament by the Masoretes with the vowels ' (= ă), ō, ā, of ădōnāi , as a direction to the reader to substitute Adonai n. for the ‘ineffable name’; which is actually done by Jerome in the Vulgate translation of Exodus vi. 3, and hence by Wyclif. Students of Hebrew at the Revival of Letters took these vowels as those of the word Yhwh (IHUH, JHVH) itself, which was accordingly transliterated in Latin spelling as IeHoVa(H), i.e. Iehoua(h. It is now held that the original name was IaHUe(H), i.e. Jahve(h, or with the English values of the letters, Yahwe(h, and one or other of these forms is now generally used by writers upon the religion of the Hebrews. The word has generally been understood to be a derivative of the verb hāwāh to be, to exist, as if ‘he that is’, ‘the self-existent’, or ‘the one ever coming into manifestation’; this origin is now disputed, but no conjectured derivation which has been substituted has found general acceptance.The following is cited as the first use of the form Iehoua (Jehova):1518 P. Galatinus De Arcanis Catholicae Veritatis ii. f. xlviij Non enim hę quatuor literę [yhwh] si, ut punctatę sunt, legantur: Ioua reddunt: sed (ut ipse optime nosti) Iehoua efficiunt.