It derives from the Latin word unda, meaning "wave", and first appears in Paracelsus' A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on the Other Spirits, published posthumously in 1566.

[4] Paracelsus believed that each of the four classical elements—earth, water, air and fire—is inhabited by different categories of elemental spirits, liminal creatures that share our world: gnomes, undines, sylphs and salamanders respectively.

Moses Binswanger, the protagonist in Hansjörg Schneider's Das Wasserzeichen (1997), has a cleft in his throat, for instance, which must be periodically submerged in water to prevent it from becoming painful.

[15] The ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles (c. 490 – c. 430 BC) was the first to propose that the four classical elements were sufficient to explain everything present in the world.

[17] Thus in the "astral plane" (or "Chaos", in Paracelsian jargon)[18] for each of the four elements, earth, air/wind, fire, and water, there resided four types of spiritual beings, a view held by Paracelsus according to his Liber de Nymphis.

Undine's husband Huldbrand had been forewarned not to do so,[24] but he rekindles his unfaithful relationship with Bertalda, he commits the insult, and she splashes away beneath the Danube.

[19] Paracelsus also emphasizes that even if the sylph/undine has returned to water, the marriage still remains valid, and she cannot be presumed to be dead,[25] another theme exploited by Fouquet's novella: thus, as her husband's transgression necessitates her departure into the watery world, she makes the insistence on her husband that his vow of fidelity still remains in place, and breaking it would have deadly consequence.

Edgar Allan Poe was profoundly influenced by Fouqué's tale, according to Pollin, which may have come about through Poe's broad reading of Walter Scott and Samuel Taylor Coleridge:[43] Scott had derived the character of the White Lady of Avenel (The Monastery, 1820) from Undine,[44] and a passage by Coleridge on Undine was reprinted in Tracy's 1839 edition.

In the 2002 video game Touhou Koumakyou: The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, a spell card called Water Sign "Princess Undine" is used by Patchouli Knowledge.

Another Japanese manga and anime series, Black Clover by Yuki Tabata, depicts a Water Spirit by the name of Undine who is contracted to the Queen of the Heart Kingdom.

The main protagonist of the 2015 webcomic Sleepless Domain is named Undine Wells, and is a magical girl with the ability to control water.

Congenital central hypoventilation syndrome, a rare medical condition in which those affected lack autonomic control of their breathing and are hence at risk of suffocation while sleeping, is also known as Ondine's curse.

[46] Ondine, the eponymous heroine of Giraudoux's play, tells her future husband Hans, whom she has just met, that "I shall be the shoes of your feet ...

After their honeymoon Hans is reunited with his first love, the Princess Bertha, and Ondine leaves him, only to be captured by a fisherman six months later.

On meeting Ondine again on the day of his wedding to Bertha, Hans tells her that "all the things my body once did by itself, it does now only by special order ... A single moment of inattention and I forget to breathe".