Diminutive of Jesse, from Hebrew meaning gift or God exists.
Jessy is a variant spelling of Jesse or Jessie, a name with deep Biblical roots. Jesse comes from the Hebrew Yishai, a name of uncertain but likely meaning connected to 'gift' or 'God exists,' and it belongs to one of the Old Testament's most pivotal figures: Jesse of Bethlehem, the father of King David and ancestor of the entire Davidic royal line — and therefore, in Christian tradition, an ancestor of Jesus. The phrase 'Jesse tree,' representing the genealogy of Christ branching from Jesse's roots, became a major motif in medieval art and stained glass.
The name traveled into English-speaking culture through the Authorized Bible, and by the American frontier era it had become a firmly masculine name with a plainspoken, working-class directness. Jesse James — the Missouri outlaw whose bank and train robberies made him both feared and, in certain romantic retellings, a Robin Hood figure — gave the name its most mythologized American incarnation. Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics under Hitler's gaze, gave it heroic and historic weight.
But the Jessie spelling had long run parallel as a feminine name, particularly in Scotland and the American South, and Jessy as a variant sits comfortably between both traditions. The y-ending spelling gives Jessy a slightly softer, more informal energy than Jesse, and it has been used for both boys and girls. In continental Europe, particularly in German-speaking countries, Jessy appears as a female name with pop-culture associations — German pop singer Jessy Kelly brought the spelling visibility in the early 2000s. For contemporary parents, Jessy feels accessible, gently Biblical, and attractively unisex.