Unusual Names for Girls: Below the Top 1000

Go straight to lists of unusual names for girls.

Often I’ll look up a name I think is attractive or stylish – or even trendy — on Nameberry, and find myself shocked to discover it doesn’t rank in the Top 1000.  How is it possible that a name du jour like Esme or Clementine, Tallulah or Wren doesn’t make it into the 1000 most popular names, I wonder, when it seems to me that every other baby girl I meet has one of these names?

But then I remember that I dwell in the relatively rarified world of Nameberry, where people’s taste in names tends to be pretty sophisticated.  Plus, some of these names seem poised for a big leap upward – or maybe that’s just my imagination?  I’ve marked those I expect to hit the Top 1000 any year now with an asterisk.

The really good news for the moment, though, is that all these names feel eminently stylish without actually being very popular.  Top name Bree was given to 262 girls last year; bottom name Louise just 100.  (I’ll deal with fashionable names given to fewer than 100 girls in another post soon.)  So while, if you live in a nameberry kind of neighborhood, it may seem as if all 108 baby Tallulahs were born within three blocks of you, the statistics confirm that it’s a highly unusual name nationwide.

That number on the left represents its rank in the complete U.S. tally.

*names destined for the Top 1000