Comments (Usage Only)

Jocelyn is certainly not a typical or traditional Polish name, but as of January this year, there have been 18 women in Poland with the first name Jocelyn. I suppose a lot of people here would struggle to pronounce it right.
I think Jocelyn is better for a girl too. I don’t think we need Joceline to be the *FEMININE FORM*. It’s just a variant of Jocelyn. This name would need Jocelus to be the masculine form. Joceline is trying too hard as a feminine form and both forms are feminine.
Actually, names which end with -n were just for boys long time ago, the feminine forms would have added an "e" or a "ne" after them.
My family comes from a French Huguenot background - people who settled mostly in Maine and New England in the early 1700's or before. There were a long line of Josselyns, including at least four Henry Josselyns, and a Henry Josselyn Taylor, my grandmother's maternal grandfather. Normally, in our family, and in that region and time, girl children were given family surnames as middle names. But my grandmother decided to make "Jocelyn" a first name, because she thought it was pretty, and in honor of her grandfather. My grandmother had never heard it used as a first name before, except in Chaucer, and she and her husband changed to that spelling because they thought "Jocelyn" sounded more like a girl than "Josselyn," and that having a unique name made the daughter "modern." (Jocelyn's sister, my mother, is Phebe - also an alternate spelling). My aunt Jocelyn was born in 1916 in New Bedford, Mass. Sometime after that, a woman who worked for my grandmother named a daughter Jocelyn as well, as she also thought it was pretty, and supposedly a friend of that woman's also took the name. My grandmother believed all the rest of the modern Jocelyns - at least in the Northeast - stemmed from my aunt!

Comments are left by users of this website. They are not checked for accuracy.

Add a Comment