Your baby name idea is less original than you think

 Posted by on 12 May 2009  Modern Life
May 122009
 

amyname

Over at BabyNameWizard, there’s a cool tool that let’s you sort through the most popular baby names over the past 130 years, and see how their popularity has risen or fallen over time.

As you can see above, “Amy” was 15th-most-popular girls name in the decade that she was born. If you type in just one letter, or one name, you can see individual trends more clearly.

But there’s an intriguing story over at Wired, which notes that no matter how individual and cool you think you’re being, what you name your child is influenced by meta-trends, like vowel/consonant preference:

In aggregate, the popularity of baby names are merely driven by the rules of fashion. By a process known as the “ratchet effect,” the names change slowly, as millions of individuals just happen to like names that sound kind of, but not too much, like ones they know …. People may think they named a child after great, great grandma Olivia, but they have a lot of great, great grandmas, and they picked Olivia because it fits the popular sounds.

Another interesting trend that they note is that the most-popular names are not as dominating as they used to be — there are a lot more individual names. As the article notes, “they end up choosing endless variations on phonetic schemes that happen to be popular: Ava, Emma, Ella, Bella.”

The latest meta-trend is for names that start with a vowel, as names that start with hard consonants drop off a cliff. But the trend for girls’ names seems to be a bit ahead of the trend for boys’ names: Jacob are Michael are still strong, especially in the States, while names like Aiden and Ethan are charging hard.

I read once, and took it to heart, that in the future, when everyone will Google you relentlessly, from schools to employers to dates (what? the future is now?) one of the greatest gifts you’d be able to have given your child would be a name that is relatively popular. Sure, maybe we all do stupid things in our youths — but “John Smith” has plausible denability in a way that “Logahn Smithwyk-Pranse” doesn’t.

Grant Hamilton

  • Juel

    I picked Amy because it means “beloved”, and she is…

    • http://www.absurdintellectual.com/ Grant Hamilton

      She definitely is!

      Also, if you delve into it, you’ll find that the names are region-specific. Manitoba, for example, has a fair bit of difference in its most-popular names when you compare the province to a) The States; and b) other provinces.

      I’m also not sure how much a name like “Amy” — with several different ways to spell it — has an artificially high popularity. For example, does every Aimee count as an Amy?

      I noticed, too, that “Grant” was cruising along nicely below the radar for many years — until my parents and their ilk came along and it doubled in popularity in about 10 years.

      I’m such a language nerd. I love thinking about meta-trends in names, and words, and pronunciation.

      Freakonomics has a good chapter on baby names, by the way.

  • Alawna (Alannah/Alana??)

    I can’t tell if my name is original or not. Am I considered to be riding the Alannah/ Alanna wave, or am I unique? My mom basically said she liked the boy’s name Lawn and added bookend “a”s to make it more “feminine”. They can google me if they can figure out how to spell my names…haha. Upon “googling it” my name supposedly means “precious awakening”.

  • Guy Davis

    The stats on the sites above only show the top 100 or 1000 names so rare ones don’t show up in the stats. Try this map of popular baby names which has stats from some regions showing rare names given to only a single baby.

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