About the name Bess
Bess belongs to the English & American tradition. Its roots are documented, even though its precise meaning is not recorded in the standard references — an honest gap we prefer to a confident guess.
In the United States, Bess first appears in Social Security records in 1880. It climbed to its best-ever rank of #157 in 1887, and in 2024 0 babies received the name — 7,166 in total since 1880. Those are the official counts, not estimates.