Elspeth is the Scottish form of Elizabeth — from the Hebrew Elisheba ("my God is my oath"). Used in Scottish naming since the 14th century. Elspeth Beard (born 1959) — British architect and motorcyclist; in 1982-1984, at age 23, became the first British woman to ride a motorcycle around the world — covering 48,000 miles across 4 continents over 2.5 years on a 1974 BMW R60/6. *Her 2017 memoir Lone Rider: The First British Woman to Motorcycle Around the World was a Sunday Times bestseller and has been translated into 8 languages. The 1982-1984 trip predated GPS, mobile phones, and the modern adventure-motorcycling community — she navigated by paper maps and faced two near-fatal accidents (in Thailand and Australia) and a tribunal for her geography degree at UCL because of her extended absence. Elspeth Huxley (1907-1997) — English colonial Kenyan-British writer; The Flame Trees of Thika (1959) was adapted into a 1981 BBC series. Elspeth Davie (1918-1995) — Scottish short-story writer; Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award (1978). Elspeth in Memoirs of a Highland Lady (1797-1830 memoirs). Elspeth Probyn — Australian feminist theorist. Saint Elspeth* is the Scottish equivalent of Saint Elizabeth.
Featured throughout Scottish literary tradition and modern adventure travel.
Elspeth does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Elspeth reduce to 4, The Builder. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.