180+ Southern Names for Girls and Boys

Cool and bluesy southern city name chosen by musician-activist Bono for his daughter.

Variant of Maribel

The original southern Good Ol' Boy.

Louisiana is a geographic spin on the Louise theme. Pretty, if a bit of a syllable overload. Short form Lou or Lulu lightens it.

Charleston is one of those baby names that may become more popular thanks to its nickname Charlie, now used about equally for boys and girls. If you want to call your daughter Charlie but believe she needs a more formal name, you might try Charleston instead of Charlotte. And Charleston is a lovely city in South Carolina.

Sister is an old-timey nickname-name for girls, ranking in the Top 1000 as a proper name for girls until the beginning of the 20th century. But more often, Sister was used as a nickname in the truest sense of the word, not a short form ala Kathy but a nickname in the way that Chip and Bud are. Or maybe Junior is a more appropriate name analogy: Sister was sometimes the nickname given to the only girl in a family of boys, so literally a descriptive word name like Junior.

Not even for Brandy's twin brother.

An old English redhead name -- one of the few that doesn't begin with the letter r -- with references both to a famous French knight and a magical horse.

Lacks the cachet of some newer place-names.

Dapper-sounding choice with old American roots (Dabney Cosby was a 19th century Virginian architect who worked with Thomas Jefferson on some of that state's most iconic buildings). Dabney Montgomery was Martin Luther King Jr's bodyguard, giving this name yet more American history depth. Dab is a sweet nickname option for this name.

If it's not too phlegmatic for you, this surname and name of a Scottish clan could honor a number of people, especially Alexander Fleming, the father of antibiotics, and Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond.

This name of a character in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is short, sweet and Southern-sounding.

Clytie was a sea nymph who loved the sun god Helios, who spurned her. She turned into the heliotrope flower.

This biblical name is also a Hebrew term for someone from Yemen, since that country is south of Israel.

A huve is 40 acres of land, so the occupational name Hoover refers to the farmer who owned and worked it. Hoover also relates to the rock band, the vacuum cleaner, the dam, and former FBI head J. Edgar.