Etymology

Proper noun

1. An English habitational surname
2. transferred from the surname. Popular from the 1920s to the 1950s.
3. (rarely) derived from the surname.

Quotations

• Hold up thy head, vile Scot, or thou art like / Never to hold it up again! the spirits / Of valiant Shirley, Stafford, Blunt, are in my arms.

• 1849 Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, Chapter XI:

  Shirley Keeldar ( she had no Christian name but Shirley; her parents, who had wished to have a son, finding that, after eight years of marriage, Providence had granted them only a daughter, bestowed on her the same masculine family cognomen they would have bestowed on a boy, if with a boy they had been blessed) - - -

• 1951 Alice Tisdale Hobart, The Serpent-Wreathed Staff, Bobbs-Merrill, page 50:

  "Why a girl like you should be named Shirley is beyond me. You haven't a ruffle or a furbelow anywhere in your nature." "Is that meant for an insult?" she asked, flushing angrily. "No, it's just that it's incongruous. You are the 'give us this day our daily bread' sort of person. Shirley is party stuff."