12 American names popular for the first time
Parents have different approaches to choosing a name for their baby girl or boy. Some consult books or read lists of names in lifestyle guides, while some name their children after celebrities, famous fictional or historical characters, their ancestors or themselves.
Some names come and go as fads, and some names that were popular make comebacks decades later. There are also names that are only now becoming popular. The U.S. Social Security Administration has been tracking baby names since before the 20th century. We identified the 12 names that have been around for more than a century but have only become popular in the past few years. These are the 12 American names popular for the first time.
The most popular baby names can be grouped into one of three categories. The first includes names that are very old and have never really gone out of style. John, Michael and Sarah all fall into this category. Because these names have not been out of style at any point in the past 100 years, more people alive are likely to be called one of these. The name Elizabeth, for example, has never dropped lower than the 26th most popular girls' name since at least the turn of the 20th century.
The second category — the one that makes up our list — includes names that have only recently become popular. In some cases, these are older names that were never common, and others were historically used more as surnames.
Some names also appear to be relatively brand-new. Aria was not even among the 1,000 most popular girls' names before the year 2000; it was the 31st most common name given to a baby girl last year.
There are also plenty of fad names that spike in popularity only to nearly vanish within a decade. It is impossible to distinguish which names on our list will remain popular and which will vanish. We can only see historical trends. In 1900, 323 girls' names were a more popular choice than Shirley. Between 1927 and 1941, the name was out of the top 10 most popular names only once. Shirley then declined in popularity, and less than 25 years later it was out of the top 100 most popular names. By 2014, it ranked 908th.
To identify the oldest names that are only now becoming popular, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the thousand most popular names for each gender in each year between 1900 and 2014 from the Social Security Administration. To make this list, a name needed to have never been in the top 100 names for that gender before 2012.
The list:
1. Annabelle
Many parents name their children after fictional characters, and perhaps this also true for the name Annabelle. It may be parents preferred it as a variant on Annabel, made timeless by the famous Edgar Allen Poe poem, "Annabel Lee." Whatever the reason, Annabelle was an uncommon name through much of the early 20th century and fell out of the top 1,000 girls' names in 1950. It reappeared in the mid '90s, however, and rebounded and to 57th by 2014, its most popular year ever.
2. Aria
While some names on this list were uncommon but still used in decades past, Aria was not even among the top 1,000 girls' names before 2000. The name has several possible roots and is the name of a patron saint. The most likely derivation of the name comes from its musical meaning. In operas, arias are solos accompanied by instrumentation. In Latin, the word means "the song." One of the protagonists of the wildly popular HBO show Game of Thrones is named Arya, which may have influenced the trend as well.
3. Piper
Another potentially musical name, Piper cracked the top 1,000 choices for newborn girls in 2000 and has become more popular nearly every year since. The name has many potential meanings. It could be reminiscent of the famous fable of The Pied Piper. Parents may also be thinking of the sandpiper, a small, agile species of bird that can commonly be found on beaches running along the surf looking for food. Piper is also the name of the protagonist from the popular Netflix show Orange is the New Black.
4. Skylar
Skylar is an androgynous name, although it is a much more commonly used name for females. In the mid 1990s, it was uncommon but used for both sexes — roughly evenly distributed between baby boys and baby girls. However, use of the name for males and females soon diverged, and in 2014, it was the 637th most popular name for boys and 48th for girls. On the hit TV show Breaking Bad, Skyler was the wife of main character Walter White.
5. Mila
The Slavic name Mila comes from a derivation of the word milu, meaning dear. It may very well be that Ukrainian-born celebrity actress Mila Kunis has been the sole driver for the name's popularity, as it was more or less unused in the United States before Kunis's breakout role in 2008's "Forgetting Sarah Marshall." It was the 72nd most popular girls' name last year, its most popular year.
6. Paisley
Few popular girls' names have had a sharper increase in popularity than Paisley. Less than a decade ago, Paisley was effectively unused. It debuted within the top 1,000 newborn female names in 2006 at 831. Just a few years later, the name had jumped to 72nd in 2014, when it was more popular than ever. Parents who choose the name may be thinking of the Scottish village, or the floral pattern of the same name with Persian roots.
7. Penelope
Unlike some of the names on this list, Penelope is a name that has been used on and off throughout the century. The name's most popular year before its recent surge was in 1944, when it ranked 265th. It actually fell completely out of the top 1,000 baby girls' names in 1976 and didn't reappeared among the top 1,000 until 2001. It has has become more common every year since. Parents naming their daughter Penelope may be thinking of the Spanish actress Penelope Cruz. In Homer's epic poem, The Odyssey, Penelope is Odysseus' wife.
8. Easton
Easton is an old English word meaning "east town." It is also a city in England as well as the name of several places in the United States. Since it debuted among the 1,000 most popular boys names in 1995, it has increased in use every year to date. In 2014, roughly 5,000 newborn boys were named Easton, making it the 83rd most popular choice for males that year.
9. Hudson
Hudson is the name of numerous towns as well a variety of geographic features throughout North America. These include Hudson Bay in Canada and the Hudson River, which runs from upstate New York to eventually border the Island of Manhattan — both named after the famous explorer English explorer Henry Hudson. Hudson has become one of the most popular boys names in the country. It was rarely used in the early 1900s and then dropped entirely off the radar for the rest of the 20th century, beginning to surge in popularity in 1996.
10. Jace
Jace, a shortened variant of Jason, has been among the 100 most popular boys' names in the country in each of the last three years. Unlike some of the other names to make this list, which jumped from total obscurity to being wildly popular within the last decade, Jace has been an increasingly popular choice for a longer time. After a brief period of rare use in the 1950s, it vanished and then returned to the top 1,000 most popular male baby names in 1979, when it was 713th. Since then, use of the name has risen to 68th 2014, its most popular year ever, when more than 6,000 male newborns were named Jace.
11. Camden
A quarter of a century ago, few, if any parents named their newborn sons Camden. In the 1990s and the 2000s, the name slowly and steadily turned up on more birth certificates until it cracked the top 100 in both 2013 and 2014. As is the case with some names on this list, it is much more commonly known as an English-derived surname. Some Baltimore Orioles fans may have baseball in mind, specifically the team's stadium, Oriole Park at Camden Yards.
12. Lincoln
Lincoln is another name more commonly known as a surname. It seems likely that a good number of the parents of the 4,785 baby boys named Lincoln last year had the 16th President of the United States in mind. Since at least 1900, the name has never fully dropped into obscurity, but instead fluctuated between the 500th and 800th position among male baby names for the entirety of the 20th century. In the mid-2000s, use of the name started to grow rapidly, and last year it was 87th overall in the country.
This article was originally posted at 24/7 Wall St.