Stacey

About the Name Stacey

Stacey is a modern English short form of Anastasia, the Greek name built on the element anastasis meaning resurrection — literally "she will rise again." As with many nickname-derived names, Stacey broke away from its source to become a fully independent given name in its own right during the second half of the twentieth century, carrying none of the Byzantine formality of Anastasia and all of the breezy informality that American parents increasingly preferred. The spelling variation between Stacey and Stacy reflects the broader trend of personalising names through alternative orthography.

The name's popularity belongs firmly to the cultural moment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when short, upbeat feminine names with a youthful ring — often derived from longer classical forms — were at the height of fashion. Stacey felt modern, informal, and unencumbered by the formality of the names it was slowly displacing, and its crisp two-syllable sound travelled effortlessly across regional and social lines.

In US Social Security records, Stacey first entered the top-1000 in 1965 and peaked at #41 in 1971, accumulating more than 113,000 top-1000 births. It remained on the chart through 2006, when it registered 267 births at #979, a gradual winding-down rather than an abrupt exit. The one recorded variant is Stacy.