Forename · entry I
The standard spelling is Jennifer: J-e-n-n-i-f-e-r. It is a Cornish form related to Welsh Gwenhwyfar, the name behind Guinevere; quiet for most of its life, very fashionable in the late twentieth century, and less common now.
The standard spelling is Jennifer: J-e-n-n-i-f-e-r. The key point is the double n after Je. You may see Jenifer in older or minority use, but Jennifer is the ordinary modern spelling in English.
If you searched spell Jennifer, how to spell Jennifer, or Jennifer or Jenifer, the answer is the same: use Jennifer unless you are copying a specific person's own spelling.
Jennifer is the Cornish form of the Welsh personal name Gwenhwyfar, which appears in early Brythonic sources as the queen later anglicised as Guinevere. The first element, gwen, is read as white, fair, or blessed; the second is variously rendered spirit, phantom, or wave. Modern reference works most often offer white phantom, though fair one is also given.
The Cornish spelling preserved a phonetic step the Welsh original had lost. It survived in Cornwall as a regional name through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and entered general English use only in the late nineteenth.
For its first sixty years of general English use the name was uncommon and steadily so. It then rose sharply, becoming one of the dominant girls' forenames in the United States and the United Kingdom in the second half of the twentieth century, before declining at a similar rate. The shape is one of the more pronounced century-spanning arcs in the modern Western naming record.
The peak in the United Kingdom and Ireland followed a roughly similar curve, displaced a few years later and shorter in duration. By the 2010s the name had returned to a steady, unremarkable level in both countries; in 2026 it is given to perhaps a few hundred girls a year across the Anglosphere.
The dominant modern spelling is Jennifer. Jenifer with one n appears in older Cornish records and survives as a small, persistent minority spelling. Jennefer, Jennipher, Jenipher and Jenifa appear sporadically. The diminutive Jenny (sometimes Jennie) is often treated as a forename in its own right and has, in some periods, been more common than the full form.
The name has no obvious masculine counterpart. Attempts to construct one (Jenifer as a unisex form; Gwen the Welsh root in masculine compounds such as Gwendwr) have not taken hold in English.
If the question is simply how to spell the name, the ordinary modern answer is J-e-n-n-i-f-e-r. That double-n spelling is the standard form in contemporary English and overwhelmingly the likeliest one intended in school, work, electoral and public-record contexts.
If you have seen Jenifer with one n, or rarer forms such as Jennefer and Jennipher, you are looking at historical or minority spellings rather than the default form. For the combined name, see Jennifer Cunningham; for public-record bearers, see People named Jennifer Cunningham.
Jennifer is usually explained through the Guinevere family of names, with meanings connected to white, fair, blessed, or the older Welsh elements behind Gwenhwyfar. For everyday name-meaning purposes, fair one is the cleanest short gloss, while the deeper etymology remains more layered.
Last reviewed: 22 June 2026. This entry is written for spelling and name-meaning searches, not for claims about any individual person named Jennifer.
The Arthurian queen, in her many forms, is the historical anchor of the name. The Cornish form was carried into general literary use by the Cornish poet John Harris in the nineteenth century. Erich Segal's novel Love Story (1970), and the film of it the same year, are sometimes given partial credit for the steepness of the American popularity rise that followed.
Beyond that, the name's cultural footprint is the cumulative footprint of the very large number of women who have carried it through the late twentieth century — a bearer-led rather than a fictional or mythological footprint.
The companion entry on the surname is at Cunningham. A note on why the combined name is so common is at The combined name. A list of well-documented bearers is at People named Jennifer Cunningham.