Boy Baby Names: The truly timeless ones

By Pamela Redmond Satran with Esmeralda Rocha

Have you ever wondered which boys’ names might have been among the Top 1000 for all of the 130+ years the U.S. government has been tracking baby names? We’ve put together a list for you and divided it into relevant categories, from classics to outliers.

Interestingly, the group of classic boys’ names is nearly twice as large as that girls’, so we broke the classic boys’ names down into categories.

There are the Core Classics, about 20 percent of the group, which include those names everyone commonly thinks of as classics: John, Henry, William.  Then there are the Biblical names that have endured in modern usage, from Moses to Matthew. Variations and short forms such as Anton and Andy comprise two more groups of names that have consistently been in the Top 1000.

And then there are those names that are quantitatively more enduring than you might guess: Harley? Riley?  Hard to believe, yet the numbers bear it out. And then there are the Outliers, names whose continued use defies explanation and even in some cases, belief.

All of this gives you a wider range of options in classic boys’ names than you might initially think.  Any of the following qualify.

Core Classics

Biblical

Variations

Short Forms

More Classic Than We Gave Them Credit For

Outliers