English Girl Names

The English section is the most miscellaneous in this library, because English naming has borrowed more freely than almost any other tradition and kept very little of its own.

The genuinely native layer — Old English names like Edith, Audrey, Hilda and Mildred — was largely wiped out after 1066, when Norman names displaced them within a couple of generations. Most were recovered only in the nineteenth century by antiquarian enthusiasm rather than by continuous use.

What English does have is a set of naming habits that produce new names rather than inherit them. Surnames became first names on a large scale, first for boys and then increasingly for girls. Place names became given names. Word-names — Hope, Faith, Joy, Summer, Ivy, Willow, Scarlett — have been generated in every century since the Reformation. Diminutives detached from their parents and became names in their own right: Molly from Mary, Nancy from Anne, Sadie from Sarah, Elsie from Elizabeth.

American naming then accelerated all of this. The invented and respelled names that dominate the fastest-rising lists — the SSA's 2025 risers included Klarity, Rynlee, Naylani and Ailanny — belong to a tradition of coinage that is genuinely a tradition, however recent, and this library records them without pretending they have ancient roots.