Angelique

French form of the Late Latin name Angelica, derived from the Greek angelikos, meaning messenger or angelic. It entered the American registry in 1915 as an imported curiosity. It gained wider momentum in the late 1960s, helped along by daytime television and European cinema imports.

The name reads like a character who owns velvet curtains and knows how to pronounce foreign dessert menus correctly on the first attempt. It peaked in 1970 when television melodrama favored high drama and gothic heroines. Despite the 1970 peak, a steady secondary run across the 1990s and 2000s means a bearer is as likely to be thirty as she is fifty-four. It remains noticeably heavier on syllables than the mid-century names that surrounded it.