Evelyn

Evelyn descends from the Old French name Aveline, a feminine diminutive that Norman families brought to England after 1066. Aveline came from a Germanic base, possibly related to the Proto-Germanic element awijaz or a form meaning little desired one, though the precise etymology is not settled. Norman barons gave this name to their daughters, and English records from the 12th century show women named Aveline in manorial accounts and court rolls. English pronunciation shifted Aveline toward Eveline and then Evelyn across two centuries of phonological drift.

The shift from given name to surname happened in the 13th and 14th centuries, as English families adopted hereditary surnames. A family with a notable female ancestor named Aveline might become the de Aveline family, then the Evelyn family, with the feminine origin entirely forgotten. By the 16th century, Evelyn was a respectable English surname held by several families in Surrey and Kent. The most consequential bearer was John Evelyn, born in 1620 at Wotton, Surrey, whose diary became one of the primary documents of 17th-century English life.

John Evelyn kept his diary from 1640 until shortly before his death in 1706, recording the Great Fire of London in September 1666, the plague years, conversations with Charles II, and the founding of the Royal Society. Samuel Pepys, his contemporary and sometime friend, wrote the more famous diary, but Evelyn's spans sixty-six years and covers a wider arc of intellectual and natural history. His prominence fixed the name Evelyn in the public mind as a surname of quality and cultivation. When Victorian and Edwardian parents began mining surnames for given names, Evelyn was an obvious candidate.

Through the early 20th century, Evelyn was given to both boys and girls without much comment. The novelist Evelyn Waugh, born in 1903, was male; his first wife was also named Evelyn, a coincidence that amused their social circle. By mid-century the name had tipped decisively feminine in most English-speaking countries, and by the 1970s male Evelyns had become rare. Today Evelyn ranks in the top 10 girl's names in the United States, and a Norman noblewoman's diminutive, a diarist's surname, and a satirist's given name are now bundled into the syllables of infant girls.