Borrowed from Latin/French words meaning "selected" or "elite," used as a positive attribute name.
Elite descends from the Latin verb *eligere* — to choose, to select, to pick out from among many — via the Old French *élite*, which referred originally to warriors or clergy who had been specially elected or set apart for high purpose. The French noun entered English in the 18th century to describe ruling classes and chosen groups, and for two centuries it remained strictly a noun of social analysis, carrying both admiration and critique depending on who wielded it. As a given name, Elite represents the modern aspiration-naming tradition that gained momentum in American English-speaking communities beginning in the 1990s and accelerating through the 2000s — the practice of conferring upon a child, at the moment of naming, an identity and an ambition simultaneously.
Names like Royal, Legend, and Major belong to the same family; Elite is among the most unambiguous of them, a single word that functions as both description and aspiration. In this sense it echoes an older tradition: Puritan names like Praise-God or Chosen carried the same directness of intent, a refusal to encode meaning in etymology when plain statement would do. Elite has found particular warmth in communities that value distinction and achievement as explicit, celebrated virtues rather than quiet assumptions.
It is a name that announces rather than whispers, and it tends to attract parents who want their child to feel, from the first time they hear their own name called, that they were chosen for something. Whether that weight becomes a gift or a pressure is, as with all aspirational names, a story that only the child can eventually write.