Yenta

Yenta or Yente is a Yiddish female name which is used generically for an old gossip.

In the age of Yiddish theater, it started referring to a busybody or gossipmonger. The word has since become Yinglish (a Yiddish loanword in American Jewish English). In the 1920s Yenta was first popularized by a famous humorist, Jacob Adler, writing under his pen name B. Kovner, in which he created the character Yenta, and featured Yenta in a Broadway play entitled Yenta Telebenta. Yenta was also his character in a 50 year writing career for the Jewish Daily Forward.

The name was used as the name of the matchmaker in the Broadway musical hit, Fiddler on the Roof, was further popularized in the famous movie "Yentl", by Barbra Streisand, and the word has also come to mean "matchmaker" in modern usage.^{[citation needed]}

The name has also been used as the following:

• The name of a highly-available key-value store for Perl
• The name of the Linux CardBus controller, which brings together Cardbus cards with the rest of the computer.
• The fictional electronic matchmaking PDA featured in the film Shortbus.
• Satirically, in the 1967 Get Smart episode "The Man from YENTA", where it was composed of the initials of "Your Espionage Network and Training Academy", a fictitious Israeli secret service organization, Also known as CONTROL's sister organization. This is a play on the title of the spy show, The Man from UNCLE.
• The name given to Dr. Frankie Bashan, "The Lesbian Yenta", an advice columnist for Curve magazine.