Jocelyn

Jocelyn arrived in England with the Normans, originally a masculine name rooted in the Germanic Gauzelin, a diminutive tied to the Gauts of Scandinavian legend. Medieval knights wore it; then, quietly, sometime around the nineteenth century, it slipped into women's territory and stayed. By the 1990s it had become a familiar sound on American playgrounds, warmed further by Jocelyn in a Cinderella Story and its Spanish variant Yoselin. Ranked 389 in the U.S., it moves through three soft syllables with a s-sound you could almost whisper. Gentle but not fragile, elegant without trying, it wears its history lightly.