Michele

Michele stems from Michèle, the French feminine form derived from the Hebrew name meaning who is like God. While Italian tradition treats the spelling as strictly masculine, American families adopted it almost entirely for daughters. It first appeared in 1905, gathering speed in the mid-1960s as a single-consonant alternative to Michelle when French-styled names swept across the radio dial.

The name reads like an electric typewriter humming on an oak desk in 1974. A Michele tends to be pictured organizing a carpool schedule with a four-color ballpoint pen. With an estimated average age of fifty-eight, the name belongs firmly to the era of rotary dials and station wagon jump-seats. More than half of all living bearers sit squarely in Generation X. Today it spends its retirement from the top fifty being misspelled by automated forms that reflexively insert a second l.