Guinevere

Meaning of Guinevere

Guinevere, the Anglicized form of the Old Welsh Gwenhwyfar—commonly parsed as “gwen” (white, fair, blessed) and “hwyfar” (phantom or spirit)—enters the Anglo-American onomastic repertoire through the Arthurian corpus, where she occupies the ambiguous yet indelible role of King Arthur’s queen and, in later medieval redactions, Lancelot’s illicit beloved; this narrative legacy endows the name with connotations of regal dignity tempered by romantic volatility. Philologically distinct from sound-alike Genevieve, Guinevere maintains the trisyllabic English pronunciation GWIN-uh-veer, preserving its Celtic cadence while remaining accessible to contemporary anglophones. In the United States, longitudinal vital-statistics data reveal a pattern of low but persistent adoption: after hovering in the mid-700s for much of the twentieth century, the name contracted to its nadir in the 1960s, then began a gradual resurgence that has accelerated in the past decade, reaching rank 676 in 2024 on 277 recorded births—a figure that, while modest, signifies renewed cultural resonance amid a broader revival of mytho-literary appellations. For parents seeking a historically grounded yet rarified choice, Guinevere offers a stratified blend of medieval erudition, melodic phonetics, and understated singularity.