World-building, as I have been of late, naturally entails making up lots of names and words. Normally, I tend to Google any word I make up to see if it's already a real word. If it is, I don't necessarily scrap it--after all, it's not unheard of for two languages to have words that sound the same, usually with different meanings. But I like to make sure the words I'm coming up with don't have exceptionally silly meanings somewhere or meanings that would make my definition ironic (not necessarily a deal-breaker, either, but I like to know about it).
But since I've been coming up with words so quickly on this current project, I don't always have time to Google things. So I was going back over a description I wrote of one religion, and decided to Google the name of one of its goddesses; Molyi.
This particular religion is something of a parody of Christianity, so it has a Trinity. Only in this case, instead of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, I have the Mother, the Daughter, and the Ghost. Molyi is the mother.
However, I have just discovered via a Googling that, in the Kivunjo language, spoken in Tanzania and Kenya, Molyi means wife.
I'm not sure if I'm going to use the name now. I might. But in any case, this gave me a chill. I felt a little like I'd accidentally tapped into some vast, ancient, secret pool of human thought. Like written in some celestial book somewhere, Molyi is, for all time, mother/wife.
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