The 'Girls' are CrossFit's original benchmark workouts — short, named tests introduced by founder Greg Glassman starting in 2003. Asked why they carried women's names, Glassman pointed at the weather service's convention for storms: anything that leaves you flat on your back and wondering what happened deserves a name. The first six — Angie, Barbara, Chelsea, Diane, Elizabeth, and Fran — appeared together on CrossFit.com in September 2003, and the roster has grown steadily since.
What makes a Girl a Girl is repeatability. Each one is simple enough to memorize, short enough to repeat every few months, and hard enough that your time (or rounds) is an honest measurement of fitness. That's their real function in a training program: not a workout you do once, but a test you return to. A two-minute improvement on Fran or three extra rounds of Cindy is proof the last few months of training worked in a way no single lift PR can match.
They also serve as a shared language. 'What's your Fran time?' works as a fitness question in any CrossFit gym on earth, because everyone is answering about exactly the same test — same movements, same loads, same standards. Every workout below links to its full page: whiteboard, rep scheme, prescribed loads, scaling for newer athletes, and the story of where it came from.