Evangeline comes from the Greek evangelion and means "good news" or "bearer of good news", the same word that gives us gospel and evangelist. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow coined the name for the heroine of his 1847 poem Evangeline, a tale of lost love among the Acadians of Louisiana. The name has been in the US top 1000 since 2006 and has climbed from number 260 in 2015 to number 147 in 2025, its best rank so far.