Diminutive form of Elza or variant of Elijah, from Hebrew meaning 'my God is Yahweh.'
Elzie is a name that arrived through the phonetic creativity of nineteenth-century American naming, most likely as a variant of Elsie, itself a Scottish diminutive of Elizabeth. Elizabeth descends from the Hebrew Elisheba, meaning either my God is an oath or my God is abundance — one of the most enduring name etymologies in Western history, the source of Isabel, Lisa, Elsa, Ellie, and dozens of other forms. Elzie represents the American frontier variant, the spelling adjusted to match the soft pronunciation favored in rural communities of the South and Midwest.
Like Elzy or Elzey, it appears in census records from the mid-1800s onward as a living linguistic artifact of vernacular naming culture. The name's most remarkable bearer was Elzie Crisler Segar, born in Chester, Illinois, in 1894. Segar created Popeye the Sailor in 1929 as a minor character in his comic strip Thimble Theatre, and watched the spinach-eating mariner take over popular culture within a decade.
Segar's full name — those three syllables, Elzie, belonging to a cartoonist from small-town Illinois — contains a certain American irony: an obscure name borne by a man who gave the world one of its most recognized fictional characters. Popeye's spinach-fueled strength, his devotion to Olive Oyl, his distinctive speech patterns all flowed from Segar's pen until his early death in 1938. Elzie today is genuinely rare — unusual enough that most bearers will never meet another — yet it carries the authenticity of an old American name rather than the arbitrariness of an invented one. It has the warmth of Elsie, the distinctiveness of an alternate spelling, and a quiet connection to one of popular culture's most enduring creations.