When Evelyn Waugh married Evelyn Gardner, their friends had to invent He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn to keep them apart — on this cover, no one will ever have to ask which Evelyn it is

Where Evelyn comes from

Evelyn began life as a surname. It grew out of Aveline, a name the Normans carried across the Channel in 1066 — itself an affectionate double diminutive built on the ancient Germanic Ava, from a root usually read as "wished for" or "longed for". A wished-for child: as name meanings go, it is hard to do better, and it is a fine thing to be able to tell a daughter when she asks what her name means.

The surname's most famous bearer was John Evelyn, the seventeenth-century diarist, and when English families later took to turning surnames back into first names, Evelyn crossed over — for both boys and girls. For a stretch of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Britain handed it out in both directions: the novelist Evelyn Waugh and the financier Evelyn de Rothschild both carried it, and Waugh's first wife was born Evelyn Gardner, which is how literary London came to know the married couple it nicknamed He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn. America never had much patience for the ambiguity — there the name belonged to girls almost from the start, riding high in the 1910s and 1920s, resting through the middle of the century with the grandmother generation, then climbing back to the very top of the charts in the 2010s. That arc, beloved twice a century apart, is why Evelyn manages to sound vintage and current in the same breath.

Say it however your family says it: America goes EV-uh-lin, while older British usage clips it to EEV-lin. A printed book never has to choose — the name on the page belongs to whoever is reading it aloud.

What Evelyn gets called at home

• Evie — The default, and for many parents half the reason to choose Evelyn in the first place: the stately name goes on the certificate, and this warm, quick one runs the household. It is the form for calling up staircases, labelling lunchboxes and ending arguments gently — some Evelyns go a whole school year without hearing the long version out loud.
• Eve — A trim from the front rather than the middle, quieter and more grown-up than Evie. It tends to arrive later — around the age an Evelyn decides that Evie sounds little — and some keep both, one for home and one for everyone else.
• Ev — The single-syllable economy version: sibling shorthand, shouted across gardens and swimming pools. Nobody chooses it; it simply happens, usually within a week of a little brother learning to talk.
• Lynnie — Taken from the tail of the name instead of the head, which almost nobody expects. It is a grandparent's form more than a playground one — and all the more precious for being rare.
• Evelina — Not a shortening but a stretch: the ornate cousin from the same Aveline root, the title of Fanny Burney's famous novel. No one uses it daily, but it makes a fine mock-formal address for solemn occasions like losing a tooth.