Looking through the birth announcements in the Scottish newspapers of the last few months-a site which also sometimes include the regions just below the Scottish border and the Isle of Man–a couple of prominent trends jump out.

First of all it’s the nickname names, which right now seem to be even more prevalent in Scotland than in England, for both girls and boys, with a plethora of Ellies and Evies, Alfies and Archies.  Here is a list of  recent ones, with some of the middle names attached to them (separated by slashes):

girls

CHARLEE

CHARLI

ELLIE May

EMMIE

EVIE May/Rose/Elizabeth/Harriet

(Alexa) GEORGIE

GRACIE May

IZZY Henderson

JOSIE Mo

LIBBY May

LOTTIE Aoife (pron. EE-fa) (more…)

If you’re looking for some eye-opening  name moments, try browsing  through some vintage name books and you might be surprised to discover just how dramatically perceptions of some  names have changed over time.  In some cases what we think of as perfectly valid current choices have actually been written off as dead and gone.  Today’s popular Ava, for instance, was rarely thought worthy of inclusion  in most name books, even fairly recent ones.  But one generation’s dusty skeleton can be reborn as another’s darling baby boy or girl, so it’s a risky business to write off a name (at least post-Etheldred period),  as can be seen from the comments below about some names we love today:

 ABIGAIL – turned into a cant term for a lady’s maid, and thenceforth has been seldom heard even in a cottage  (1884)

DEBORAH – has acquired a certain amount of absurdity from various literary associations which prevent ‘Deb’ from being used except by the peasantry (1884)

CHLOE –  its main use has been by pastoral poets   (1945)

ESME – is now sometimes given to girls   (1945)

MATILDA —   among the most disliked names for girls   (1967)

SOPHIA – went out of fashion in the 19^th century   (1945)

VICTORIA – is now almost obsolete  (1945)

COLIN — by the 16^th century was regarded as a rustic nickname and it gradually died out altogether  (1945)

CONNOR –  now survives mainly as a surname  (1945)

ELIJAH—it died out in the general 19^th century deline of biblical names, but not before it had established its shortening to be Lige (1979)

Masculine names like HARRY, JACK and SAMUEL are rarely used for babies today   (1950)

ISAAC, ABRAHAM — names from the Old Testament are disappearing  (1967)

JONAH – most everywhere regarded as sissy  (1967) (more…)

We’re honored to have Michael Shackleford, the inventor of the Social Security baby name popularity list, as today’s nameberry guest blogger.  Shackleford played a pivotal role in the history of American baby naming by constructing the first national count of the Top 1000 names.  Shackleford, who can now be found at the Wizard of Odds, talks about the hows and whys behind his ground-breaking work.

The most frequent question I get about my baby name popularity lists is why I started making them.  To give some context to why, my name is Michael, and I was born in 1965.  At that time, and for every year from 1961 to 1998, Michael was the most popular boys name in the United States.  When I was in elementary school, there were always one or two other Michaels in the same class.  When the teacher called on “Michael,” we all had to ask, “Which one?”  At my first job, in a fast food place at Knott’s Berry Farm, there was a big board with everybody’s name and daily cash register errors.  When I was hired, there was already a Mike Smiley on the list.  So I had to become Mike Sh.  After that, everybody would whisper, “We better be quiet, Mike Shhhhh is here.”  To this day, every time somebody calls out “Mike” in public, I have to turn around and investigate.  Usually, I’m not the intended recipient and end up looking like I came in second place in a popularity contest, when the other Michael is warmly identified.  Over the years it has become very annoying.

In 1992, I took a job with the Office of the Actuary at the Social Security Administration headquarters in Baltimore.  My main duty was to estimate the effect to the trust funds given a hypothetical change in Social Security law.  I used samplings of Social Security records, calculating the monthly payment under the current law and the proposed changes, took the difference, and adjusted for the sample size.  I had lots of interesting data at my fingertips to make such calculations.  One of the more interesting files was a 1% sampling of Social Security card applications.

Five years later, in 1997, my wife was expecting our first child.  Naturally, after my negative experiences as one of many Michaels, I was not about to give my child a popular name, but I no longer had any idea what the popular names were.  Keeping up to date was not easy at the time, especially for girl names, which go up and down in popularity much faster than boy names.  It was only my intent to stay out of the top 25 or so.  Many people incorrectly assume I take the extreme position of advocating a name nobody has heard of.  No, a normal name is fine with me, just as it is not too trendy or conformist.

To determine what the most popular names were at the time, I wrote a simple program to sort the Social Security card data first by year of birth, then by gender, and then by first name.  It takes a while to go through a tape of millions of records, but after about an hour the results came in.  What I got back was a huge document of first name popularity lists dating back to the 1880’s.  I believe my eyes at that moment were the first to ever see an accurate nationwide sampling of given names.

(more…)

Yesterday we took a look at the long-delayed UK Office for National Statistics’ list of most popular girls’ names in England and Wales for 2008–and now it’s the boys’ turn.  We see many similar patterns across the gender divide, though perhaps even more names in the boy’ column that are less familiar in the US.

The top ten names are:

1. JACK–#1 for the 13th consecutive year

2. OLIVER*

3. THOMAS

4. HARRY– relecting the popularity of both the younger prince + Harry Potter

5. JOSHUA

6. ALFIE–the name of a perpetually popular BBC TV character

7. CHARLIE

8. DANIEL

9. JAMES

10. WILLIAM

*Note must be made though, that the ONS, like our Social Security Administration, ranks each spelling of a name separately, and if all the spellings of the name Mohammed were totalled, that name would rank in second place, reflecting Britain’s growing ethnic diversity.

As with their sisters, there are a number of male baby names in the UK top 100 that don’t even appear in the US top 1000 at all.  These include:

ALFIE
ARCHIE
HARVEY
THEO
FREDDIE
LOUIE
EWAN
ZAK

Here again, an astonishing number of nickname names–60%! – a couple of which it’s difficult to imagine catching a Virgin trans-Atlantic flight and landing over here–certainly true in the case of Louie.  Another that pops out is Harvey, an upscale Brit favorite rarely considered in the US (except, of course, by some bold nameberryites). (more…)

At the beginning of this year, the UK ’s Office for National Statistics let it be known that they wouldn’t be issuing their annual lists of most popular names due to recessional budget cuts, and a collective moan was heard across the name-o-sphere.  (Can you imagine what would happen if our Social Security list didn’t appear one Mother’s Day?) 

Well, I don’t know what happened–maybe the uproar was too deafening–but suddenly,  nine months later, their lists of top 100 boys and 100 girls names  in England and Wales have now materialized.  Definitely a case of better late than never.

Once upon a time I used to think that, since we share the same language, the Yanks and the Brits would have similar taste in names.  That was before I married a Brit myself and it came to naming our daughter, when I saw just how different our perceptions of most names were.  And though things have evened out to some degree with the rise of the Internet and the international sharing of opinions, looking at the top English girls’ names today (we’ll take up the boys’ next week), we can see that there is still quite a divide.  (more…)