“Paul from LA” wrote in with this link to a site I kind of remember using when we were picking a name for my daughter. It lets you type in any first name and graphs how popular it has been (in the U.S.) over the past 130 years. What’s less obvious is that if you hover over the graph at any point, it can show you a name’s rank in that year.
For example, here’s John, which has fallen from #1 to #20.
It’s worth a bit of time-wasting to see how names come and go.
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May 9th, 2008 at 8:08 am
Hey. What the hell. My name was #1 recently.
I feel so anonymous now.
May 9th, 2008 at 8:38 am
Mine is falling down year to year. And I tend to know why ;-)
May 9th, 2008 at 11:00 am
I typed “Zelda” and almost laughed.
May 9th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
I was surprised to see Adolph still having some popularity in the 50s and 60s. I has assumed that the number of Americans naming their sons Adolph would have dropped to zero by 1942.
May 9th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
About the history of names.
I typed “Hedda” but nothing came up.
Henrik Ibsen, who is regarded as a super-realist, was very inventive when it came to names (which is to say, he consistently came up with names that are much more interesting and telling than Norwegian names of the period generally were). “Hedda” is actually a made-up name of his.
There have been a couple of American Heddas (all post-Ibsen) but the name is so rare that it doesn’t register at all on this baby-name website.
Hedda Hopper for instance (Wikipedia: “… an American actress and gossip columnist, whose long-running feud with friend turned arch-rival Louella Parsons became at least as notorious as many of Hopper’s columns”).
Hedda Hopper was born in 1880 as Elda Furry (Hedda Gabler was premiered in 1891 and the play was first shown in the U.S. in 1898).
In 1920, or thereabouts, Elda the wannabe actress decided she needed a new name. According to Wikipedia she paid a numerologist $10 to tell her what name she should use, and the answer was Hedda. Well, the name seems to have served her well. Not as an actress though but as a gossip columnist.
The same goes for Elda as Zelda: these names reached their peak of popularity in the 1910s but had totally fallen out of fashion by mid-century. But Hedda never caught on, not in the U.S. or anywhere else.
May 9th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Well, that’s a half hour I didn’t spend writing. The fun part is I’ll be renaming all the characters in my current script, just for kicks.
May 9th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
My given name, Jerry, reached its peak in the 40s, when the U.S. was at war with “the Jerrys.” Odd. Maybe this helps explain why “Adolph” didn’t quite die off. :)
May 9th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Interesting: “Einar”, Redfords character in “An Unfinished Life”. A name with an early, short and low peak, never to be seen in that list again.
May 10th, 2008 at 10:43 am
The Freakonomics book has an interesting chapter on how names go through their evolution – how they surface, who adopts them first, when they get their second wind etc. http://www.slate.com/id/2116505/
They also predict which names will be popular in 2015 – http://www.babynamesgarden.com/freakonomicswatch.aspx
May 10th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Win! Our brand new daughter (born 5/8 — yes, I’m bragging) named (and spelled) after my great-grandmother has a spelling that doesn’t show up! “Madlyn” (exact spelling) doesn’t show up. Neat.
May 12th, 2008 at 9:52 am
Who knew “John” would be on a track to become a rare name again? We had some inventive names in my family’s past, most notably “Aquilla”. I want to name my baby Aquilla the Hun. http://spinachflame.wordpress.com/
May 12th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
At #20, “John” isn’t exactly rare. Just less omnipresent.
May 12th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
My name is so 70’s. And long. And somewhat obscure. I’m like the Quicksilver Messenger Service of names.
Sweet.