The most popular baby names of 2011 are officially here, with Sophia unseating Isabella to become the the new top girls’ name in the U.S..

Jacob remains the most popular name for boys for the 13^th year in a row.  An Old Testament name that means “supplanter” and a cousin of James, Jacob has been in the Top Ten for nearly two decades.

The Social Security Administration announced the 2011 Most Popular Baby Names on The Today Show this morning.

The complete Top Ten are:

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This week, Nameberry Style columnist Elisabeth Wilborn, of You Can’t Call It It and The Itsy Factor, waves her magic wand over the girls’ top 100 list and transforms overly-popular names with chic new alternatives.

The list of top girls’ names is brimming with gorgeousness. After all, the top girls’ names got that way because people love them.

But if you seek a more rare, chic alternative for your little one, play this game with me. Ask yourself, is it the sound that makes you fall in love with a name? Is it the fact that it honors your heritage? Perhaps it’s the meaning? Whatever the names’ deepest appeal, there may be another, less popular option that will satisfy you.

I had fun with this list, maybe even more so than with the boys’ names because there are just so many viable options to choose from.

How would you amp up the style of the girls’ names from the top of the chart, and are there any that you’re too in love with to change?

1) Isabella–>Mirabella
2) Sophia–>Louisa
3) Emma–>Alice
4) Olivia–>Ottilie
5) Ava–>Rita
6) Emily–>Cecily
7) Abigail–>Tabitha

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Charlotte is the Number 1 for girls among our most popular names 2010, cementing the lead that the royal feminine variation of Charles has held among visitors to our site all year.  Our number two and three girls’ names are Violet and Seraphina, both names of the daughters of Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck, which has gone far to popularize them.

Four other names on the nameberry Top 10 for girls have risen steeply through our ranks: They are Eliza, Amelia, Adelaide, and Imogen.  Names beginning with vowels count for seven of the girls’ Top 10.

Nameberry’s 2010 most popular names list counts the number of times visitors to our site searched each name throughout the year, which we like to think gives the discerning baby namer an excellent insight into which names are attracting the most buzz.   Of the 4.5 million views our name pages gathered last year, more than 11,000 went to Charlotte alone, making it the most-searched name on the site for either gender.

None of the names in the girls’ Top 10 is among the U.S. ten most popular names.  Elizabeth comes the closest, 10 on the nameberry chart and 11 on the U.S. count.

Other girls’ names we see rising most over 2010 and predict will continue to be popular in 2011 are marked with an asterisk, and include Harper, Clementine, Aurora, Leila, and Genevieve.

Check out our 2010 most popular names for boys.

Following are the nameberry Top 100 2010 most popular names for girls.

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See lots more classic girls’ names.

So you’re interested in classic girls’ names for your daughter, and at first what constitutes a classic seems pretty clear: Katherine qualifies, for instance, and so does Elizabeth.

But very quickly, as Linda and I discovered classifying names for our books, what’s classic and what’s not becomes really murky.  Anne, sure, but Anna?  Annie?  If Annie’s in, does that mean that Laurie also gets to accompany Laura?

Then recently, we hit upon a quantitative formula for choosing the classic girls’ names: We’d define that as every name that had been in the U.S. Top 1000 every single year since 1880.

We came up with 114 names, but many on the list will surprise you as much as they surprised us.  Elizabeth is there, for instance, but so are Elisabeth and Elise.  Jenny makes the grade, but not trendier sister Jennifer.  Caroline and even Carolyn, yes; Carol, no.

To make the roster of classic girls’ names easier to digest, we’ve divided it into groups.  If you think we misplaced anything, let us know.  You always do!

Core Classics

• Alice
• Ann and Anne
• Caroline
• Catherine

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See the hottest names for 2011!

Baby names 2010, nameberry style, are a fascinating collection, with Charlotte still at the top of the list for girls. Seraphina and Olivia follow at numbers 2 and 3, as they did at the end of the first quarter.

Names making the biggest leap up the list for girls are Harper, Jane, Quinn (influenced, no doubt, by Glee), Clara, Clementine, Ivy (a new entrant to the Top 100), and Bryn.  Other names new to the girls’ list are Juliet, Jillian, and Pearl.

Names falling the fastest are Willa, Lydia, Piper, and Lauren. Off the Top 100 this quarter are Bella, Beatrix, Maya, Mila, and Yvaine (though we confess to having to idea how that made it to the most-searched roster last time around).

Our Baby Names 2010 Top 100 list is compiled from the most-viewed names on nameberry for the first half of the year. The up and down arrows represent movement up or down the list compared with the first quarter of this year; an equal sign means the name is in the same position as it was first quarter. Double arrows indicate movement of more than fifteen places up or down.

Don‘t, however, take the meaning of the arrows too much to heart.  Often they represent movement of only a place or two, and a name’s movement over a single quarter can be influenced by a host of small factors unrelated to a true shift in popularity.

Of course, this list is vastly different than the official list of Most Popular Names in the U.S. The Social Security list is based on all actual births and name choices in the country, while the nameberry list measures which names our relatively style-conscious visitors are most curious about. Plus the nameberry list is up-to-the-minute, while the most recent Social Security list is for 2009.

Consider this, then, a look at which names will be more popular in the months and years ahead. We got some flack when we issued the quarterly list for calling these “elite” names, but we stand by that characterization. On the premise that nameberry’s visitors are better informed about names and have more discerning name taste than the general population (you do, don’t you?), we see these as names favored by parents who are looking for names with style, class, and staying power.

Can a small number of people searching repeatedly for a specific name skew the results? No. We can see not only how many times a name was searched but by how many unique individuals, so to those of you who tried to game our system by searching for Pervis and Gomer: We’re on to you.

Here, the Top 100 girls’ names for the first half of 2010. Tomorrow we’ll bring you the boys.

girls

1. CHARLOTTE =

2. SERAPHINA =

3. OLIVIA =

4. VIOLET up

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