The name Kayleigh is special and if this is your name you should know it. While everyone now-a-days is trying to fancy up their name by replacing every vowel with -eigh-, I want everyone to know, you were the first.
It all started in 1985 when Marillion, a British band fronted by Scottish singer Fish (aka Derek William Dick), released a single titled "Kayleigh" that reached the tops of the UK music charts. And voila, Kayleigh was born!
And everyone thought, wow, amazing, I love this name! Kayleigh shot up the name charts and was top 30 in England and Wales only 2 years later. Invented names become popular all the time, but 2 years from introduction to top 30 is historic. In the US it made a bit less of a splash. Kayleigh was briefly the most popular spelling, but the Kaylees and the Kaileys took over and left Kayleigh in "alternative spelling" land.
But Kayleigh had a kind of magic. No one ever looked at Kayleigh and said "that name is made up". Baby name books went to great lengths to find legitimate precedents. Kayleigh showed up for the first time in name books in the 1990s and was grouped in with all sorts of established names with known etymologies. Authors even scrounged around for some new ones making Kayleigh a name with a very diverse set of published meanings. Here are just a couple sourced from name books, some of questionable scholarship:
If Kayleigh is a variation of Kaylee, it comes from the nickname for the Hebrew Kelila which is said to mean laurel or crown.
If Kayleigh is a spelling variant of Cayley, Kaley or Caley, then it is from a Norman French surname from the place name Cailly, which means forest.
If Kayleigh is a spelling variation of the Manx name Caoladh, then in means slender.
If Kayleigh is a modern invention combining the names Kay and Leigh and Kay is from Katherine then it means pure.
If it's an invented name, then it may have been influenced by Kylie, popularized in Australia by novelist Kylie Tenant, where it was a nickname (her name was Kathleen) and is an aboriginal word meaning boomerang.
If Kayleigh is a variation of Kelly, then it's from an Irish surname which is an anglicization of the male name Ceallach, traditionally given as meaning bright-headed.
If Kayleigh is an alternative spelling of the Arabic name Kalila, then in means sweetheart or girlfriend.
And on and on. By 2006 the Collins Dictionary of Scottish names said Kayleigh was popularized by Marillion but "existed before 1985" and that it was "the anglicized form of the Gaelic word ceilidh meaning ‘a Scottish dance or gathering’. "
Was there any truth to any of this? Back to 1985. The song "Kayleigh" was partially written about an ex-girlfriend of Fish's named Kay. To obscure the connection to the real Kay he added her middle name Lee, changed the spelling to Leigh, and smooshed them together. Leigh was a logical step as Leigh Taylor-Young had established this as a feminine spelling of Lee in the 1970s in the UK. Loosely, if Kay is indeed short for Katherine (it isn't always), and you accept "pure" as its meaning (it might not be), then at least one of the previous name book meanings got it right.
But was anyone named Kayleigh before 1985?
Yes! I can find at least 10 people from records that existed before 1985 that were probably named Kayleigh. At least half of them are from Australia, all were born in the 20th century, and a couple of them were men. There's even a street in an industrial area of Maroochydore, Queensland, Australia, that was verifiably named Kayleigh in at least 1980 (the other street was Kelly, maybe named after sisters?). There's an 80 year old woman from the Isle of Wight (note: about as far as Scotland as you can get without a big boat) who might have had this spelling pre-Marillion.
But that's it. Everything else I've found has been text recognition mangling of Rayleigh or records created post 1985 of people born pre-1985 for which I can't rule out name changes. Kayleigh even became more common as a surname spelling post-1985.
Kayleigh wasn't technically the first -leigh to trend for girls. Ashleigh started showing up in the American social security name statistics for girls as early as 1966 and has always been more popular than Kayleigh in the US. Ashleigh was a pre-existing spelling of the surname Ashley. Raleigh has been around for boys since the stats begin in 1880s, again from the surname. Plus there's plain ole Leigh, again from the surname, which has been in use for men and women in the US since the 19th century. But Kayleigh was the first truly popular -leigh name in the UK.
And what of the fun dance meaning, the connection to the Gaelic word ceilidh? Was Kayleigh ever used as anglicization? Not that I can find. In fact when an English phonetic spelling of ceilidh was provided, it was usually explained as kaylee or kay-lee. It appears the only published connection between Kayleigh and ceilidh is that Collins dictionary entry. There was a 1988 period romance novel called My Wicked Enchantress by Meagan McKinney that anachronisticly linked Kayleigh to ceilidh. "You see, that's why I'm named Kayleigh, Ceilidh in Gaelic. I was born later, on the other side of midnight of the New Year. My parents named me for the celebrations of Hogmanay." This is the earliest example of Kayleigh connected to ceilidh.
Just 4 years later Julia Cresswell writes this in the Tuttle Dictionary of First Names (1992) for the Kayleigh entry: "This girl’s name, which is currently enjoying enormous popularity, is probably best analysed as a blend of Kay and Leigh rather than a phonetic rendering of the Gaelic ceilidh (‘party’). "
In 1985 there were two girls named Ceilidh in Scotland. Even if ceilidh wasn't the origin of Kayleigh, from the start they were being connected. I left a comment on another forum saying Ceilidh was not given as a name before 1985. Two people told me they knew about a couple Ceilidhs born in the early 80s in Scotland and one born in the 1960s in Canada. Searching further I found Ceilidh recorded as being used by at least 2 people before 1985, but none in Scotland. There were however 2 Caley, 1 Cailey, 1 Caleigh, 1 Kayley and 1 Kailie recorded in the Scottish name stats before 1985 (these have since been excluded by a privacy cutoff by the Scottish Statistics agency). Those older Ceilidhs may have informally changed their spelling to the perceived correct Gaelic spelling. Kayleigh may have given us the name Ceilidh, not the other way around. The Ceilidh way, a hiking trail in Nova Scotia, could have inspired the earlier Canadian Ceilidh.
All those name books and all those name meanings have resulted in some convoluted entries on baby name sites. They try to aggregate the name meanings like some gospel harmony. Kayleigh is riding a donkey and a colt and dying on both the Thursday and the Friday. Here is an entry from thinkbabynames.com :
Kayleigh as a name for girls is of Gaelic origin, and the name Kayleigh means "slim and fair; slender". Kayleigh is an alternate form of Cayla (Irish, Gaelic): from Caoilainn. Kayleigh is also a form of Kaylee (Gaelic). See also Ceilidh
And here's one from mamanatural.com:
Kayleigh is a unisex name of Scottish and Irish origin. The name is a combination of two names, “Kay” and “Leigh.” “Kay” is a variant of the name “Keith,” which means “wood” or “forest.” “Leigh” is a variation of “Lee,” which means “meadow” or “clearing.” So when you put it all together, Kayleigh means “woodland meadow” or “forest clearing.” How lovely is that?
Add Keith to list of origins. These name meanings gather like cats on a fence and make their way into other name definitions. At one point the multiple sourced wikipedia page for Kailey read:
The name has multiple origins depending on the spelling. In English it means "keeper of the keys". In Scottish Gaelic it derives from "Cèilidh", meaning "social celebration". "Kailey" is Greek for "rare beauty". It is also a Welsh name meaning "slender". From Irish/Gaelic origin, Kailey means "slim and fair". In Hebrew it means "laurel", "crown" or "princess."
The Kailey spelling also doesn't have a lot of pre-1985 use as a first name. As far as meanings go, it was used to mean "red stoney land" in English language Irish books, and one instance as the English spelling of ceilidh. It appears most often as a surname, which is likely where it comes from as a first name spelling.
After all this searching I've concluded that Kayleigh and most other spellings only came into common use as first names after the Marillion song. Of the connected names, only Kelly, Kayla and Kylie were in common use before 1985. Kaylee definitely existed and does seem to be actually derived from Kelila but it wasn't common and leaned Jewish. There was a 1979 pirate romance novel called Under Crimson Sails which featured a Kaylee, but it could always have been formed independently from Kay and Lee smooshed together.
The baby name books have always been in Kayleigh's corner, refusing to let it be classified as a "modern invention" like the Everleighs and Hayleighs that followed. Kayleighs should proud that their name inspired such devotion and that namenerds for generations will have to spend hours trying to separate the truth from the legends created in their name.
If only we could all be so lucky to have such a historical name.
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