This name was borne by the heroine of Lewis Carroll's novels Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871).
Although this is a grammatically masculine adjective in French, it is given to girls as well as boys in Britain and the Netherlands. In America it is more exclusively masculine. It is not commonly used as a name in France itself.
It has only been commonly used as a given name since the 20th century, influenced by two plays featuring the character: William Butler Yeats' Deirdre (1907) and J. M. Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910).
Other famous bearers of this name include Spanish painter Diego Velázquez (1599-1660), Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (1886-1957) and Argentine soccer player Diego Maradona (1960-2020).
The French theologian Jean Calvin (1509-1564) and the philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) are well-known bearers of this name. It was also borne by the German-French Dadaist artist Jean Arp (1886-1966).
As an English Christian name, Levi came into use after the Protestant Reformation.
As an English name, it became popular due to the Fleetwood Mac song Rhiannon (1976), especially in the United Kingdom and Australia.