Deloris

An American phonetic variant of Dolores, drawn from the Spanish devotional title referencing Our Lady of Sorrows. While the traditional spelling arrived in the United States in the nineteenth century, paperwork clerks and parents began popularizing the alternate ending around the turn of the century. It climbed steadily through the 1930s before settling into the midcentury landscape.

A Deloris belongs almost entirely to the middle of the twentieth century, with the average bearer today in her mid-seventies. The name carries the texture of shorthand dictation pads, aluminum screen doors, and carbon copies. It reached its high-water mark in 1947, when nearly one thousand infants received the name. Today, the name reads as someone who remembers when long-distance telephone calls required prior coordination.