Meaning and history
Giselle comes from the Old German element gisal, meaning “hostage” or “pledge” (Proto-Germanic *gīslaz), and may originally have been a descriptive nickname for a child given as a pledge to a foreign court. It was borne by a sister and a daughter of Charlemagne, a daughter of the French king Charles III who married the Norman leader Rollo in the 10th century, and Gisela of Swabia, wife of the Holy Roman emperor Conrad II. Popular in medieval France in the form Gisèle, the name became familiar in the English-speaking world through Adolphe Adam’s ballet Giselle (1841) but was not widely used there until the 20th century.
20062006: 2,090 births, rank #168
2007: 2,596 births, rank #134
2008: 2,489 births, rank #136
2009: 2,402 births, rank #134
2010: 2,090 births, rank #147
20112011: 2,038 births, rank #152
2012: 1,709 births, rank #185
2013: 1,563 births, rank #206
2014: 1,577 births, rank #215
2015: 1,489 births, rank #221
20162016: 1,463 births, rank #220
2017: 1,176 births, rank #273
2018: 1,106 births, rank #301
2019: 976 births, rank #329
2020: 937 births, rank #332
20212021: 847 births, rank #361
2022: 907 births, rank #350
2023: 889 births, rank #347
2024: 872 births, rank #357
20252025: 803 births, rank #382
Giselle moved from #358 to #382 for girls between 2024 and 2025. Its highest annual birth count came in 2007, with 2,596 births.