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ArchivesThe name "Kelsi/Kelsey"
Hi everyone. On just about every name site I see it posted that the name Kelsey is an Irish name meaning "Brave." My wife is pregnant with our first child and she is a girl! We came across this and got really excited, although I can't find any sources on this information. On this site, it does not say that this name is Irish or that it means anything similar to "brave." Why do so many sites say it's Irish? Why do so many people say it mean's "Brave"? Any advice?
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Replies
It's money winning out over integrity. A baby name book will sell more copies, or a website will get more hits, if they post flattering meanings about names. When a prospective parent looks up the meaning of a name they already love and it's obviously positive, they get good vibes about the site/book and continue to use it. Because that's their business, the content providers are not above making something up.
Other books and websites, also in it to make a buck and not always for the love of names, are lazy. Instead of doing their own research, they simply copy what other sources are saying. Usually the most popular ones.
I remember a few years back when the name Neveah started popping up everywhere. It's simply "heaven" spelled backward, and that's its only real meaning. However, somebody somewhere felt (rightly in my opinion) that that was a pretty insubstantial and silly foundation for a name. So all of a sudden, sites started popping up saying it meant "butterfly" in Native American, all copying each other. Trouble is, there was no one single First Nations language, there were a lot of them. And people who'd done research on those languages couldn't really seem to find "Neveah" in any of them.
Other popular names with genuine but not necessarily positive meanings like "misshapen head" or "crooked nose" or "Lincoln's wetland" get their meanings reimagined all the time.
It's hard to know the good name sites and books from the bad ones, but as a general rule, the ones that are geared toward babies-babies-babies are the usual suspects for making stuff up. The ones that are geared toward the name nerds doing research are much better.
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Where the name Kelsey is concerned, in the 90s and early 2000s there was a name trend boom where insubstantial names that included the letters K and Y got really out of control. Keely, Kaylie, Kylee, etc. Although Kelsey has a much richer history than many of the others, it rode that wave and got hugely popular. Its reputation suffered from the association for many people including myself. Moreover, because it was so overused during that time period, it's very dated now.
Other books and websites, also in it to make a buck and not always for the love of names, are lazy. Instead of doing their own research, they simply copy what other sources are saying. Usually the most popular ones.
I remember a few years back when the name Neveah started popping up everywhere. It's simply "heaven" spelled backward, and that's its only real meaning. However, somebody somewhere felt (rightly in my opinion) that that was a pretty insubstantial and silly foundation for a name. So all of a sudden, sites started popping up saying it meant "butterfly" in Native American, all copying each other. Trouble is, there was no one single First Nations language, there were a lot of them. And people who'd done research on those languages couldn't really seem to find "Neveah" in any of them.
Other popular names with genuine but not necessarily positive meanings like "misshapen head" or "crooked nose" or "Lincoln's wetland" get their meanings reimagined all the time.
It's hard to know the good name sites and books from the bad ones, but as a general rule, the ones that are geared toward babies-babies-babies are the usual suspects for making stuff up. The ones that are geared toward the name nerds doing research are much better.
____________
Where the name Kelsey is concerned, in the 90s and early 2000s there was a name trend boom where insubstantial names that included the letters K and Y got really out of control. Keely, Kaylie, Kylee, etc. Although Kelsey has a much richer history than many of the others, it rode that wave and got hugely popular. Its reputation suffered from the association for many people including myself. Moreover, because it was so overused during that time period, it's very dated now.
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In my experience, someone "imagined" the meaning and everybody else copied it. For the record, the surname Kelsey is most common the US, England and New Zealand (about 1 in 18,000). In Ireland it is rare (1 in 290,000), so probably brought by English settlers. "Imagined" etymologies began in the 18th C., before there was really any disciplined field. The Grimms in the 19th C. began the first real analysis and codified the first key laws governing how languages change, but even they got specific etymologies wrong, because they lacked the necessary documents. The surname Kelsey appears very near its modern form in the 13th C.. We know by comparison that the second element is "ey", meaning an island, peninsula (near-island), coastal land or anywhere defined by water (in this case a floodplain). Kelsey (now South Kelsey) appears in the 11th C. Domesday book as Colesi, however North Kelsey a few miles away is spelled Nor(t)chelsei (y replaced i as a scribal convention for clarity). The original may have been "Cole's ey", shifted to Chelsei in a process known as leveling (ch indicates a front |c|, before |e|, compared to a "back" |c| before |o|, not modern English ch in church).
This message was edited 11/2/2017, 6:08 AM
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Pretty much what the above posters said about books making up name meanings. I have found that when a name book writer can't find (or can't be bothered to find) a name's meaning, they put either "brave" or "beautiful" as the meaning!
However, it's possible that Kelsey, originally a place name, comes from ey ("island; peninsula") + the Old English name Cenel meaning (from "cene" meaning "brave; fierce; valiant"). It may also come from Ceolsige, from Ceol meaning "ship; small flat bottomed boat" + "victory." Ceol was also used as a name in Old English.
However, it's possible that Kelsey, originally a place name, comes from ey ("island; peninsula") + the Old English name Cenel meaning (from "cene" meaning "brave; fierce; valiant"). It may also come from Ceolsige, from Ceol meaning "ship; small flat bottomed boat" + "victory." Ceol was also used as a name in Old English.
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There's no OE name Cenel that I can find, and the place names are not recorded in that form. That again is early antiquarian speculation. The extant forms in the Domesday book imply that the earliest form was Coleseg (g pronounced as |j| as in Jaeger), later Colesei, but that by the founding of North Kelsey the |o| had been leveled to |e| by umlaut, with resulting palatalization of the |c|, hence the spelling Nortchelsei (ch still pronounced as k, but palatal rather than guttural k). Cola, Cole and Col- are recorded in OE names, with a sense of "coal-black". It's part of a thematic class which seems to refer to hair color (various words for red, brown, black or dark are recorded). The recorded forms of Ceol are Ceol, Ciol, Cel or Ceal, not Col, so do not explain the earliest recorded spelling of Kelsey. O shifts to e by umlaut, not the other way round.
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