Unusual Antique Baby Names

One of the jewel names in use a hundred years ago, due for revival along with sisters Ruby and Pearl.

Eustace was originally popularized by St. Eustace, who was born a Norman nobleman and is said to have been converted to Christianity by seeing a crucifix between the antlers of the deer he was hunting. It was introduced to England by the Normans, and can be found in medieval legend. In literature the name appears in the person of Eustace Clarence Scrubb in C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia.
The image of Eustace today is as sedate and stuffy as the monocled Eustace Tilly character on The New Yorker magazine covers. Its diminutive Stacy became a unisex hit.

The Selma-Thelma-Velma connection dates it.

Unfortunate identification with an army of rats in the movie of the same name.

Aline may have originated as a short form of Adeline in the Middle Ages, but it may also be a variation of the Irish Aileen or Scottish Eileen. Aline dropped off the Top 1000 in the 1950s. Fewer than 40 baby girls were named Aline in the US last year.

The kind of serious old-school name that sounds appealing again; perfect for the intrepid baby namer. More commonly spelled Rosamund but highly unusual these days in either version, with fewer than 20 baby girls named Rosamund in the US last year while Rosamond didn't even register with five.

Eula is a slightly sweeter and more compact version of Eulalia. Currently, neither name is given to more than a handful of girls each year. Eula was fairly popular in the US during the early twentieth century, and she last ranked in the Top 1000 in 1960.

Junius is one of those names that's growing on us, along with many of its Roman countrymen such as Julius and Atticus. We once thought it was a combination of the least attractive elements of Junior and Julius but now we think...well, we think it's okay. Not great, but okay.

Hardy is a spirited and durable un-Germanic German surname that is starting to be used in this country.

Presidential surname adopted as a first by numbers of midcentury African-American parents.

Letha is taken from Lethe, the mythological River of Oblivion. Letha now sounds as if it's missing a first syllable.

Yes, we tend to think of Claude as a male name and Claudia and Claudette as the female, but this ancient clan name is used in France for girls as well as boys, and could make a distinctively chic boy name for girls here too. You may be surprised to know that Claude was in fairly regular use for American girls in the 1880's and nineties, reaching as high as 553 in 1880.

Despite Thornton Wilder, playwright of the perennial Our Town, only a handful of baby boys receive this name each year..

Shades of Thurston Howell, the effete millionaire castaway on Gilligan's Island.

Wilda (or Wylda) has two widely divergent images. Pronounced vill-da, it feels like a cousin of Hilda: a sturdy and none-too-attractive prairie settler. But you can also think of her as wild-ah, as in the feminine of wild and wilder.

An English family name used a few generations ago as an Anglicization of Moses, but hardly heard since th 1950s.

Webster is one of several W-starting surname names back on the drawing board, now that it has recovered from its childlike eighties sitcom identity.

Pansy is an early floral name that lost credibility when it became a derogatory slang term for gay people. Better these days: Posy or Poppy.

A name with an obvious meaning, for a long time associated with Golda Meir, the fourth Prime Minister of Israel. Nickname Goldie seems to be catching on in the celebrity community.