Finn

• celtic root, designates fair hair.
• germanic root, designates moist-swampy places and rotten smell.
• the Dubliner Tim Finnegan, a hod carrier who fell drunk from his scaffold and dies. On his wake, a bottle of whiskey broke on his coffin and he came back to life. The event is depicted in a popular American street ballad from the 1850s called "Finnegan's Wake (text and background information). Much of the text of the ballad is echoed in the first chapter.
• Fionn mac Cumhail (earlier Finn or Find mac Cumail or mac Umaill, pronounced roughly "Finn mac Cool") was a legendary hunter-warrior of Irish mythology, also known in Scotland and the Isle of Man. The stories of Fionn and his followers, the fianna, form the Fenian cycle, much of it supposedly narrated by Fionn's son, the poet Oisín. The Fenian Brotherhood took their name from these legends.
• Huckleberry Finn, character in a book by Mark Twain, friend of Tom Sawyer
• Finn may be a variant of fin, a colloquial term for the U.S. five dollar bill bearing a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.
• part of the name of the country Finland
• Finn is the name of the giant who, according to folk mythology, built the cathedral in Lund.
• Finn is a Frisian lord who appears in Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg.
• Finnegan: Fin (french, 'end') again: A circular conception of history; also like a refrain in a song.
• Finicky
• Also suggested that the title "Finnegans Wake" is another way for Joyce to say "Finn again is awake"--in reference to the legend of Finn mac Cumhail who is reputed to sleep under Dublin until Ireland's greatest hour of need.