A word for “gift”, also the name of tengwa #23 [h] (LotR/1123), derived from the root √ANA “motion to” and more precisely meaning “a thing handed, brought or sent to a person” (PE17/91).
Conceptual Development: The earliest iteration of this word was ᴱQ. an (and-) “gift” in the Qenya Lexicon under the early root ᴱ√ANA (QL/31). In the contemporaneous Gnomish Lexicon Tolkien gave ᴱQ. anō as the equivalent of G. ôn “gift” (GL/62). The Etymologies of the 1930s had ᴹQ. anna “gift” under the root ᴹ√ANA “to, towards” (Ety/ANA¹). The word anna “gift” appeared among tengwar names in notes on The Feanorian Alphabet from the 1930s and 1940s, though in the former it was for double nn [5P] (PE22/23) and in the later was the name of a variant short vowel carrier [ゼ] not appearing in Tolkien’s later writing, and in any case the paragraph with this name was deleted (PE22/52 note #193).
In Late Notes on Verb Structure (LVS) from 1969 Tolkien had both anna “gift” and anwa “gift” (PE22/163), the latter perhaps derived from ✱(h)an-mā. Tolkien indicated that this version of the noun influenced by {√ƷAN >>} √HAN “enhance, enrich, add to”.
Use as a Tengwar Name: The application of anna as the name for tengwa #23 is quite mysterious. In Quenya this tengwa was originally used to represent a voiced velar spirant ʒ < g, and after that sound was lost was used only to represent consonantal y by adding a palatal marker [hÍ]. Since anna has nothing to do with either sound, my best guess is that the name anna comes from some “full mode” where tengwar #23 represents the vowel a, except that in most full modes it represents the vowel o.
Alternately, it may be that at some point Tolkien imagined the noun anna as being derived from ʒannā; see the [rejected] root √ƷAN in its 1969 etymology noted above. In the 1930s this tengwa was named Osse either as a vowel sign for o or as a derivation of ᴹ√GOS (PE22/22), and in the 1940s it was named {’anne >>} ’enne “thought, purpose” where the ’ indicates lost ʒ (PE22/51 and note #190).
anwa adj. "real, actual, true" (ANA2)