What’s in a name? Children of the Collective Consciousness.
Published by Jess Jul 31st, 2008 at 14:26 in charts and graphs, history. 9 responses.
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You may have unwittingly named your child after a meme in the fabric of society. Or you yourself may be nothing more than the product of hive minded parents.
So what’s in a name?
I have always been interested in naming things, it’s one of the reasons why I own so many unused domain names. And the naming of ones child is most likely the most important act of naming a person will encounter, so it always peaks my interest to find out why a particular name hold true to a set of parents.
After coming across a very cool set of visualization tools from Nametrends.net which pulls data sets the Social Securtity Administration, my curiosity got the best of me. Particularly because my wife and I only last year named our son, Forest.
The data shows that the name Forest is not popular at all, about 1 in 10,000, however the double ‘r’ variant, Forrest, is 10 times as common. Interestingly enough, both variants had a noticeable peak in the last 80 years, 1994. The same year Forrest Gump debuted and won 6 Oscars. Surely a correlation. We passed on the second ‘r’ in Forrest for precisely this reason, in case our son Forest is ridiculed by future bullies (think “run Forrest run!), he can at least he can get off on a technicality.
But with such a well presented set of data (love the sparklines!), I had to go further and there were many surprises as well as mysteries. Did you know that ‘Isabella’ was the second most popular name for girls last year? Or than for boys, Logan is more popular than John, Jack, or Robert? Or than since 1987, more boys have been named ‘Angel’ than girls. There are more baby boys named Angel last year than Kevin or Justin. Good thing we didn’t consult baby name books, or else we could have ended up with an Angel too, the #1 name for boys in Arizona, #2 in Nevada, #3 in California, #5 in Texas. In 18 years time there will be an army of Angels register to vote in the Southwest. Politicians and marketers take note.
But for me, the real mystery is why have there been such surges in the frequency of certain names. ‘Angel’ has been around for over a century and on the rise since the early 1990’s, perhaps coinciding with the popular CBS series, Touched by an Angel, although this doesn’t explain the rise in use of the name for boys while for girls it has fallen since 2001.
Some names have increased in frequency several thousand percent over the course of a decade, some as much as 50% in one year alone. Below are some visuals that show the sudden concentration and expansion of a ‘vogue name’. The darker the state, for greater frequency the name.
First lets look at my own name, Jesse. My birth certificate says ‘Jess’ but the sans ‘e’ variant hasn’t been in vogue for over a hundred years, so I used the more common ‘Jesse’.
Jesse
As you can see, my namesake is popular during the 70’s and 80’s and then seems to fall out of favor in the past decade. I’m not sure why. Perhaps a lack of Jesse role models or famous Jesse’s in general. The peak for my namesake was in 1981. Perhaps it was because former Minnesota governor and then wrestler Jesse Ventura won the World Tag Team Championship a year prior. That is a bit of a stretch, but the previous peak was a hundred years prior in 1882, the same year Jesse James was assassinated by the coward Robert Ford. Am I off base in making the connection?
Ok, over to more modern namesakes. The girls name ‘Ava’. You may know a few, its the fourth most popular name last year and up 4,441% in the past decade. Ava has always hovered in the 1 in 5,000 range but recently it’s almost 1 in 100. As you can see below, its not even on the radar until the explosion in the past few years.
Ava
With no notable Avas to speak of, I cannot explain the rise in this collective mind set. Anyone care to offer en explanation?
Other name explosions are easier to correlate. The name ‘Naveah’ which is ‘Heaven’ backwards did not exist before 2000. It was then that P.O.D singer Sonny Sandoval gave the moniker to his daughter who was featured on the show MTV Cribs. Like some ticking time bomb of the zeitgeist, Naveah rocketed up the list to #31 on last years’ most popular name for girls, above Julia, Jessica, and Katherine. Bear witness to the power of a Christian metal rockstar’s power to influence 1 out of every 300 parents in the US.
Nevaeh
It doesn’t take a clever backwordification to create a naming sensation however. Here are two more names with no cultural origin that have really come out of nowhere.
Aiden for boys.
And Addison for girls.
They rank 31 and 11 respectively on last years list. Addison did not exist as a girls name before 1994, even though the male version has been around for a century. Sudden rises like these baffle me, anyone care to take a shot at their origins?
If a some babies name are indeed fads then it would stand to believe that they would fall out of favor rather quickly. One good example is the name Brittany. In 1979 you had a 2,178 chance of being born a Brittany. Ten years later and every 50th girl was a Brittany. Now we are back to 1979 levels. Did the saturation of Brittany’s reach such concentrated levels in 1979 that the peoples inner iconoclasm unleash backlash of better judgment? See for your self.
Brittany.
It’s also interesting to note that the single ‘t’ variant, Britany, is much less common, in fact it’s barely on the radar, despite Ms Spears best efforts.
If most of the recent extremely popular names can’t be traced back to popular figures then what causes their rise? Perhaps I am mistaken in thinking that famous people are even a factor. Maybe there is some underlying driving force that germinates a particular name in the heads of parents, and the correlation with celebrities is only a coincidence. I would love to hear some alternate theories.
But first let me present the ‘Dwight’ case. It’s hardly a popular name these days, and even it’s glory days it was never more than 1 in 1,000. Yet there are definitive peaks. So I took the most famous Dwight of our era, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and matched up his popularity with that his name. You can be the judge on whether there is a true correlation or not.
Now one final case is that of ‘Billy’. I tried to think of a southern name to see if there were names prevalent in only certain parts of the country. I knew this was the case but all the names in the top 100 each year are spread through the country. At one point, back in 1934, 1 in 100 kids were Billy, not Bill or William, but Billy. As you can see below, Billy rarely makes an appearance out side of the Bible belt.
Billy
So there is a geographical correlation as well as a possible celebrity correlation, and some overlap as well. But what else is there? What effects the minds of parents, practically simulataneously, creating a two-fold increase in the frequency of some names in only a years time? It’s interesting to ponder for sure.
p.s. Another interesting factoid is that since 1880 the greatest frequency of names is a tie between John and William, who in 1880 were both 1 in 12 of newborn population. The current most Frequent is Jacob who numbers 1 in 90. No doubt the further back we go, beyond 1880, the greater concentration but I have yet to find data for that.
I’m still looking though.
