Evelyn
- Gender
- Female
- Meaning
- Light
- Origin
- Celtic
About the Name Evelyn
Evelyn's etymology is doubled and slightly contested. The most credible scholarly trace runs through the medieval Norman French Aveline, a diminutive of an older Germanic name Avi of uncertain meaning, sometimes connected to a root meaning "desired" or "hazel." An alternative reading connects Evelyn to Eve via the Hebrew Chava ("life") with a diminutive ending. Most modern dictionaries list both possibilities without preferring either.
For several centuries Evelyn was used as both a male and female name in England — the surname Evelyn appears in 17th-century English records, and most famously in the diarist John Evelyn (1620–1706), a contemporary of Samuel Pepys whose decades of detailed journals are a major source for late-17th-century English life. The name shifted to predominantly female usage in the 19th century, partly through the influence of the novel Evelina (1778) by Frances Burney.
20th-century bearers include British novelist Evelyn Waugh (a man, despite the now-feminine reading — and famous for Brideshead Revisited), aristocratic memoirist Lady Evelyn Cobbold, and contemporary actress Evelyn Keyes. The current American Evelyn surge is part of the broader vintage-female-name revival alongside Charlotte and Amelia, and the name climbed from US #58 in 2010 to the top 10 by 2018. The name's appeal is its soft elegance — three syllables, gentle consonants, slightly old-fashioned but never musty. Common nicknames are Evie, Ev, Lyn, and the rarer Eve (which is now itself a popular independent name); variants include the Irish Aibhilín and the related Aveline.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Evelyn
US Popularity History (1894–2025)
Annual US births named Evelyn by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1921 with 14,278 girls named Evelyn (girl rank #12 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #8 for girls (9,123 US births). That's 4 places above its earlier 1921 peak — the name is more popular now than it has ever been.
Source: US Social Security Administration. Limitations: US birth-certificate data only; names appearing fewer than 5 times in a given year are suppressed for privacy; spelling variants are counted separately. For names that ranked outside the US top 100 before year 2000, only the years they reached the top 100 are shown — the chart may have gaps for less-popular historical names.
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Where in the US Is Evelyn Most Popular?
Average girl-name rank within each state across 2016–2025 SSA records. A lower number means the name appears closer to the top of that state's girls-name rankings — a per-capita measure that isn't biased toward large states. For Evelyn the strongest states are Minnesota, Wisconsin, Oregon.
Strongest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Minnesota | #3 | 2,360 |
| 2 | Wisconsin | #3 | 2,223 |
| 3 | Oregon | #4 | 1,348 |
| 4 | Iowa | #4 | 1,220 |
| 5 | Idaho | #4 | 719 |
| 6 | North Dakota | #4 | 383 |
| 7 | Washington | #4 | 2,638 |
| 8 | Utah | #4 | 1,569 |
| 9 | Nebraska | #5 | 774 |
| 10 | Vermont | #5 | 219 |
Weakest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New Jersey | #38 | 1,416 |
| 2 | Hawaii | #35 | 173 |
| 3 | Florida | #28 | 3,290 |
| 4 | Mississippi | #24 | 511 |
| 5 | Connecticut | #24 | 683 |
| 6 | Nevada | #22 | 565 |
| 7 | Rhode Island | #22 | 220 |
| 8 | West Virginia | #20 | 406 |
| 9 | District of Columbia | #20 | 227 |
| 10 | New York | #20 | 3,696 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Evelyn in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
Looking for names like Evelyn?
A dedicated page with 60+ related names — spelling variants, rhymes, alliterations, same-origin matches, and shared meaning concepts — lives at its own URL so each kind of similarity gets a deeper treatment than fits here.
Compare Evelyn to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Evelyn against today's most popular girls-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).
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