Vintage Baby Names: Testing the 100-year rule

Updated Thu Jan 05 2023

In the world of baby names, there's something called The Hundred Year Rule, which holds that it takes a full century for a name to shake off its dusty image and sound fresh again.

When we look at the popularity lists for a hundred years ago -- 1923 -– we see any number of vintage baby names that have already popped back, names like Grace, Ruby, Emma, Ella, Violet, Sadie, Ruby, Isabel, Max, Oliver and Felix.

The question is, are there any names from a century ago that we’ve overlooked and are still worthy of re-evaluation? Here are some you might consider from the popularity list of 1923—although we do have to keep in mind that the US population then was about 30% of what it is now, so some of these names were attached to a very small number of babies.

GIRL NAMES

BOY NAMES

About the Author

Linda Rosenkrantz

Linda Rosenkrantz is the co-founder of Nameberry, and co-author with Pamela Redmond of the ten baby naming books acknowledged to have revolutionized American baby naming. You can follow her personally at Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. She is also the author of the highly acclaimed New York Review Books Classics novel Talk and a number of other books.