The most widely accepted explanation of the name is linguistic. The venerated cloth kept at Rome, bearing what was believed to be the imprinted face of Christ, was called the vera icon, Latin vera, "true," and Greek eikon, "image", the true image. In popular speech vera icon is thought to have contracted into Veronica, so that the name of the relic was gradually mistaken for the name of a person, and a woman was invented to account for it.
An older strand supplied a candidate to bear the name. The apocryphal Acts of Pilate tells of a woman called Bernice (Greek Berenike), whom Western tradition identified with the unnamed woman healed of a haemorrhage in the Gospels. In the legend she possesses an image of Christ, in some versions painted, in others miraculously formed, and carries it to Rome, where it heals the emperor Tiberius. Medieval writers merged this Bernice with the vera icon and produced the composite Saint Veronica.
The two accounts agree on the essential point the atlas records: the personal name is secondary. Whether by contraction of vera icon or by identification with Bernice, Veronica the woman grew out of Veronica the picture, and the roadside episode is a late crystallization of a much older cult of the Holy Face.