Inez

Inez is the anglicized spelling of Inés, the Spanish and Portuguese cognate of Agnes, derived from the Greek hagnē meaning chaste or pure. American registrars adopted the z-ending spelling early, bolstered by romantic nineteenth-century English verse like Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. It stayed on American birth rolls without interruption from the first government counts in 1880 onward.

The name reads as a woman who never needed to raise her voice to be heard. It carries the weight of 1920, the year it hit its historical peak of about two thousand births. Today the average bearer is around sixty-two, meaning the name still largely inhabits living rooms with well-kept upholstery and rotary-dial memories. The final consonant gives it a sharp bite that keeps it from drifting into lace.