Giselle
- Pronunciation
- [Gi-selle]
- Gender
- Female
- Meaning
- Pledge.
- Origin
- French
About the Name Giselle
Giselle descends from the Old French Gisèle, ultimately from the Old Germanic gisil meaning "pledge" or "hostage" — referring to medieval European customs in which noble children were sometimes given as pledges of agreement between rival families or kingdoms. Despite the unfortunate origin, the name has been continuously used in French and German naming traditions for centuries.
The name's overwhelming cultural anchor is the 1841 ballet Giselle, composed by Adolphe Adam — one of the most-performed ballets in the Western classical tradition. The Romantic ballet's tragic-supernatural story (the peasant girl Giselle dies of grief after her aristocratic lover's deception, then returns from the dead as a Wili — a vengeful ghost — but ultimately spares her unfaithful lover) gave the name a permanent classical-ballet register.
The contemporary American Giselle surge is partly through the ballet anchor and partly through Brazilian-American supermodel Gisele Bündchen (born 1980, the Brazilian fashion model who became one of the highest-paid models in the world through the 2000s and 2010s). Giselle climbed from outside the US top 500 in 1990 to the US top 200 girls' rank by 2014 and the top 200 since. The name's appeal sits in three contemporary American naming preferences: the layered French-Germanic-classical-ballet pedigree, the modern fashion-cultural anchor, and the soft two-syllable French elegance. Common nicknames Gigi (the dominant warm short form), Sel, and the rare Elle each carry distinct registers; the alternate spellings Gisele (the Brazilian Bündchen spelling), Giselle, and Gizelle have their own SSA tracking. International forms include Gisèle (French original, with accent), Gisela (Spanish/Portuguese), and the original Old Germanic Gisil.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Giselle
US Popularity History (2000–2025)
Annual US births named Giselle by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2007 with 2,596 girls named Giselle (girl rank #134 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #382 for girls (803 US births). That's 248 places below its 2007 peak.
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 Giselle 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 Giselle the strongest states are California, Delaware, Texas.
Strongest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | #144 | 2,271 |
| 2 | Delaware | #158 | 18 |
| 3 | Texas | #181 | 1,654 |
| 4 | Nevada | #203 | 130 |
| 5 | Arizona | #207 | 300 |
| 6 | Illinois | #251 | 433 |
| 7 | New Mexico | #263 | 60 |
| 8 | Maryland | #289 | 193 |
| 9 | New Jersey | #312 | 252 |
| 10 | Florida | #315 | 546 |
Weakest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Alabama | #771 | 36 |
| 2 | Ohio | #759 | 103 |
| 3 | Missouri | #750 | 31 |
| 4 | Indiana | #706 | 80 |
| 5 | Louisiana | #673 | 50 |
| 6 | Tennessee | #667 | 99 |
| 7 | Kentucky | #646 | 19 |
| 8 | Minnesota | #633 | 69 |
| 9 | South Carolina | #627 | 69 |
| 10 | Pennsylvania | #622 | 162 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Giselle in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
| Name | Meaning | Gender | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Giza | Cut Stone | Female | Hebrew |
Looking for names like Giselle?
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 Giselle to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Giselle 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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