In many baby name books, Shelley is listed as meaning "From the meadow on the ledge" or "clearing on a bank" sometimes truthful and pretty. It is Old English in origin. As with many other names (Ashley, Courtney, etc.), Shelley is today a name given almost exclusively to girls after historically being male. Shelley is also a transferred surname used by those in Essex, Suffolk and Yorkshire, particularly in settlements where a wood/clearing was beside a ledge or hillside.
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Famous quotes containing the word shelley:
“Cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“It is his weakness to be proud: he derives, from a comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects that surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingness of human life.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“There grew pied wind-flowers and violets,
Daisies, those pearl’d Arcturi of the earth,
The constellated flower that never sets;
Faint oxlips; tender bluebells at whose birth
The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets
Its mother’s face with heaven-collected tears,
When the low wind, its playmate’s voice, it hears.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)