Category: trendy baby names
Popular Names 2012: The new top baby names!
The most popular baby names of 2012 are officially here, with Sophia and Jacob holding onto their Number 1 spots.
Jacob remains the most popular name for boys for the 14th 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.
Sophia, which took the crown as the Number 1 girls’ name last year, is a Greek name that means “wisdom.” It entered the Top 10 in 2006.
Arya and Major were the fastest-rising names for 2012. Arya’s popularity stems from the show and book Game of Thrones, while Major is a military name featured on reality TV show Home by Novogratz.
Second fastest-risers Gael and Perla are widely used by parents of Spanish descent.
The Social Security Administration announced the 2012 Most Popular Baby Names on their website this afternoon.
The complete Top Ten are:
Baby Names Trend: I-Ending Girl Names To Keep An Eye On
Angela Mastrodonato, creator of the trend-watching blog Upswing Baby Names, will be a regular contributor to our Bonus Blog. Today she looks at girls’ names with a new twist at the end.
There’s one vowel that’s found at the end of seemingly every girl name. That vowel, of course, is the A. Today the focus is on girl names ending in a different vowel– the incredible I.
The most popular ends-in-i name for the moment is Naomi, an Old Testament name long popular in the Jewish community, which is at an all-time popularity peak. Naomi broke the top 100 for the first time in 2010, and has gradually reached #93 for 2011 (the most recent year Social Security name data is available).
Another ends-in-i name that has seen recent success is Maci, which has dramatically ascended the charts. After spending a decade in the bottom top 1000, Maci achieved Top 200 status within a short two-year span, probably thanks to being the name of a teen mom featured on MTV reality shows.
Baby Names: Once so hot, now so not
The history of baby names is littered with former stars that burned brightly for a decade or two, only to fade from view.
It’s hard to believe, from this vantage point, that Gladys or Edna ever made the Top 20, that names such as Harold or Larry were ever popular enough to dominate an entire decade.
It’s difficult to see Irene and Albert as the Isabella and Alexander of their day, to view Tammy or Tiffany as the height of cool.
Many of these once-hot names are lovely, even classic. They’re just not as stylish as they once were (although some, especially from the earlier decades, are on their way back in).
We looked at the Top 25 baby names for each decade of the 20th century to pick out choices that were hot back them, and are not today. Included here are Old People Names like Bertha and Clarence, Baby Boomer names such as Karen and Gary, today’s mom and dad names such as Jennifer and Jason, and names like Taylor and Tyler that are beginning to be heard much more often on babysitters than on babies.
Baby Names Trend: The Jennifer Juggernaut
Yes, there are baby names that have had longer runs at the top of the popularity list. Mary and John, certainly, and, more recently, Michael, who ruled for 44 years, yet none of them came to be seen as an epidemic or to signify a whole generation in the way that Jennifer did, though she was Number 1 for a mere fifteen years.
But in that time, between 1970 and 1984, there were 859,112 little Jennifers born in the US—enough for online Jennifer identity-loss support groups to spring up as they matured, enough for future parents to bemoan “I don’t want my child to be one of five named Jennifer in her class,” and enough for us to call our first book Beyond Jennifer and Jason. Jennifer became a one-girl baby names trend.
But why Jennifer? A once obscure Cornish form of the old Welsh Gwenhwyfar, aka Guinevere, a name that was hardly heard here before 1938—except for an appearance in a 1905 Shaw play– and which didn’t enter the Top 100 till 1956.
Baby Names That Mean Light
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