Girl is the ordinary English word for a female child and is extremely unusual as a given name.
The word 'girl' itself has a surprisingly murky etymology, one of those everyday English terms whose origins philologists still debate. Its earliest appearances in Middle English — as 'gurle,' 'girle,' or 'gerle' — date to around the thirteenth century, possibly borrowed from Low German dialects, possibly related to the Old Norse 'gjǫr' (ready, eager), or conceivably connected to an Old English root that simply did not survive. Remarkably, in its earliest usages the word was gender-neutral, referring to any young person regardless of sex; it narrowed to its feminine meaning gradually over the medieval period.
As a given name, Girl sits at the extreme edge of naming practice — it is exceedingly rare and, in most jurisdictions, would draw bureaucratic scrutiny. There is a small tradition, primarily in certain African and Southeast Asian communities, of using common nouns and descriptive terms as personal names, a practice that carries its own dignified cultural logic: naming a child for what she simply, beautifully is. In English-speaking contexts, the occasional use of Girl as a name tends to be either artistic — a statement of defiance against prescriptive naming conventions — or an expression of radical simplicity.
Literary and cultural uses of 'Girl' as an identifier rather than a name are extensive: from the anonymous girl-figures of fairy tales to the modern reclamation in titles like Toni Morrison's work, the word has always carried both vulnerability and power. A child named Girl would carry that entire freight of linguistic history — the ambiguity, the long slow narrowing, and the eventual reclamation — in two small syllables.