Variant of Chelsea, from an Old English place name meaning 'chalk landing place.'
Chelsie is a variant spelling of Chelsea, a name that began as a very specific place: Chelchith, a landing place on the north bank of the Thames in London where chalk and limestone were once unloaded from river barges. The Old English compound — 'cealc' (chalk) and 'hythe' (wharf or landing place) — gradually transformed through centuries of spoken use into the Chelsea we know today, and from that neighborhood the name made the leap into the lexicon of personal names that is common to many English place names. The Chelsea neighborhood itself has contributed enormously to the name's cultural resonance.
By the nineteenth century it had become associated with artists and writers — Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde all had strong connections to the area — and by the 1960s 'Swinging London' had made the King's Road, running through Chelsea's heart, the epicenter of British youth culture, fashion, and music. The Chelsea Hotel in New York City became a parallel legend on the other side of the Atlantic, its bohemian corridors housing writers and musicians from Dylan Thomas to Patti Smith. The name Chelsea entered the mainstream of English-speaking baby naming in the 1980s and reached particular visibility when President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton named their daughter Chelsea in 1980 — a choice reportedly inspired by Joni Mitchell's song 'Chelsea Morning.'
The Chelsie spelling, with its '-ie' ending, gives the name a warmer, more personalized feel and aligns it with the long tradition of feminine names ending in that friendly diminutive sound. It carries the cultural weight of its London origins while feeling thoroughly contemporary.