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My name is JANCEY............I am British (English) and was always told by my parents that this name was French but on meeting and asking French people they said that they had never heard of it! Any suggestions on finding its origin. I have come across it occasionally on American sites.....I found a Jancey museum and a Jancey street.
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A novelist called Mary Webb wrote a ludicrously popular romantic novel called Precious Bane in, I think, the 1920s. Very forgettable, except that the hero was Kester and the heroine was Jancis.
Jancis must surely be a hybrid of Janet/Janice/Janis and Frances. It has been used ocasionally since the book came out, and it is pretty! It seems likely that Jancey is either a form of Jancis or an elaboration of it, perhaps based on Janet + Nancy.
Jancis must surely be a hybrid of Janet/Janice/Janis and Frances. It has been used ocasionally since the book came out, and it is pretty! It seems likely that Jancey is either a form of Jancis or an elaboration of it, perhaps based on Janet + Nancy.
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We still don't know whether it is being used as a male or female name. Even unisex names often start out as one or the other, or are the same familiar name for two gender-differentiated formal names, like:
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Jancey is extremely rare in the UK as a first name, so you're one of a select few. My guess would be that it's from the surname - a long-established one which seems to occur with that spelling mainly in the Midlands and around the Welsh borders. To my knowledge there are no French names or places which sound or look anything like it, except - big stretch here - the town & lake of Annecy (pronounced an see) in eastern France, but I can't see that as a likely origin.
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Jansen/-son...?
Another male possibility, a familiar form of JANSEN/JANSON (as a first name).
Another male possibility, a familiar form of JANSEN/JANSON (as a first name).
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A nickname for the surname JANTZ...?
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It is not unusual for an unvoiced |ch| to be corrupted to a voiced |j| sound. There is further support in that Chauncey is a variation of Chance, which rhymes with the |Jance| part of the name. |-y| in both cases would likely be the familiar/diminutive form of the names.
In naming cultures that are based, primarily, on euphony, there is no compulsion to maintain spelling and pronunciation standards.
See LATHAN for a more extreme example.
Admittedly, it IS a SWAG.* Feel free to offer other/better ideas...
*Scientific, Wildly Assumptive Guess...
This message was edited 8/31/2014, 7:47 PM
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