Nick Gillespie points to the most popular baby names of 2007, compared to 1950. Two interesting things:
1) The long tail: the 10 most popular baby names now account for only a tenth of the babies born in the US, rather than a quarter
2) The return to the bible: More than half of the names are biblical, most from the Old Testament. Is America getting religion? Or have we gotten so irreligious that "Ethan" sounds vaguely exotic?
A lot of biblical names are also American traditional, but skipping back a few generations. We're not quite ready to revive Mildred and Virgil, which only died out recently, but we're going back to the generations before that.
I met a young Dwight recently. Nearly fell over. Perhaps he was named for his great-grandfather.
....and their middle names are all "Hussein"....
I'd guess #2.
A few other points.
1) Fashion in girls' names changes faster than boys' names, hence the long dominance of "Michael"--#1 all but one of the years from 1954 through 1998!--while girls went through a number of favorites.
2) The popularity of certain names can often be traced to particular people, often fictional. For instance, Love Story featured "Jennifer" and the next thing you know, the name, rising throughout the 60s, became #1 from 1970 to 1984.
It's also interesting the note the changing popularity of variant spellings. For example, "Stephen" was bigger than "Steven" in the first half of the 20th century, but not the second half. However, I can't see "Meagan" or "Meghan" overtaking "Megan," even as the name overall (just like "Steven") is on the way out after its peak years in the 80s and 90s.
Meagan,
We are so irreligous we think "Ethan" is a good name because there is an actor named "Ethan Hawk". Chosing old style names is the way 21st century white yuppies try to appear dignified. Go down to any high end playground in Washington. You won't find too many named "Gus", "Sam" or "Joe". But scream out a name like "Ethan" or "Jacob" or "Joshua" and no doubt ten or twelve screaming brats will come running to you. I swear the more I live in Washington the more I become a self-loathing white person.
Ethan and Jacob have spiked in the last two decades but Joshua, Christopher and Matthew have declined in absolute numbers per million, even if they have held steady in relative rank. Maybe the religious names have risen to the top because religious Christians haven't changed their naming habits as much as other parents?
Two other thoughts:
1. The 1950 list contains a lot of biblical names, too.
2. Perhaps second and third generation hispanics are more likely to adopt the English versions of popular biblical names in deference to their Roman Catholic heritage?
Re: We are so irreligous we think "Ethan" is a good name because there is an actor named "Ethan Hawk".
Learn something new everyday. I wouldn't have even guessed that Ethan was Biblical since it sounds more Anglo-Saxon (abd vaguely WASPish) than Hebrew. I had to look it up-- and I don't blame anyone for not recognizing the name as the only Ethans mentioned in the Bible are a couple of extremely obscure figures, not prophets or kings or early Christian saints. Also, I don't think I've ever known a Jewish guy with the name.
Madison ... who woulda guessed that would be a popular girl's name?
"The return to the bible: More than half of the names are biblical, most from the Old Testament. Is America getting religion? Or have we gotten so irreligious that "Ethan" sounds vaguely exotic?"
Why not both? Americans seem more religious than fifty years ago, but at the same time some names have become secularized and separated from its original connotation to a certain extent. "Mary" was once considered too holy a name to give a child and wasn't common for centuries in the Christian world. Then the name became common, often combined with the middle name.
What surprised me is how similar the two lists from 1950 and 2007 seemed. I would have expected at least one Spanish name to be in their. The contrast with the rise of last names like Patel, Nguyen, Gonzalez, etc. in the US just goes to show how much integration takes place in the US. I've probably gone to school with a couple of kids named David Wang and such over time. Using such secularized Biblical names might just be part of the integration process that we don't consciously observe without lists like this.
Actually, according to one of the sites referenced in the article, Joseph and Samuel are currently the 13th and 25th most common names for boys. No variation of Gus has much traction though.
However, the site does indicate the long tail effect; those two names combine for 0.7% of boys born in 2007.
Another interesting (and annoying) pattern that it confirms is the prevalence of "J names"...approximately 7%. Only A and C are half as common. Of course there are old standbys like John, James, and Jeff, but it's also a great source of annoying modern names like Jeremiah, Jonah, Jacob, Joshua, Jared, etc.
alan:
I find it amusing that at least 4 of the 5 names you just called "modern" are from the Bible. I admit, I don't know if Jared is or not.
Democrats name their kids after sports and media stars.
Republicans name their kids after the grandpaent with the most money.
Democrats name their kids after sports and media stars.
Republicans name their kids after the grandparent with the most money.
It is from the bible--moreover, having gone to a mostly jewish school, I thought of those names as having been common thirty years ago.
We named our 7 year old Joshua partly because we liked the solid, old-testamenty feel to it, but also because we though it wasn't one of those trendy names that every third kid has. Sigh. It could have been worse I guess - we had been considering Jacob for the same reasons. Maybe we need to get out more.
I was surprised by how modern the 1950s names were. I don't know what I was expecting exactly - more Mathildas and Zachariases maybe? Or was that the 1850s?
I'm also surprised that my name has been in the top 100 at least since the 1960s, given the number of people I regularly encounter who seem to have no idea how to pronounce it.
You guys (and Nick Gillespie) are just catching onto something I knew about YEARS ago when I was introduced to one of the most fun websites ever (at least for people like me who have had a running list of good kid names since elementary school).
http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager
Using the Social Security rolls, this site shows, in a very neat way, how names have trended since the 1880s.
I'm proud to say that my DD's name, Louisa, was at its peak in popularity in the 1880s (or possibly before) and hasn't been in the top 1000 names since the 1970s. I like that because I really didn't want her to be one of 5 girls in the class with the same name (which I wonder if Megan had to deal with, since my classes growing always had at least two Megans, some with wacky spellings), and I also didn't want something so out of the mainstream that people would misspell or mispronounce it.
I've learned a lot of interesting things about names since I started really thinking hard about it over the past year. For one, names usually get trendy in the UK before they get popular here (though I suspect the resurgence of Jemima in Britain won't be followed here, for obvious reasons).
Also, Madison was popularized by the movie Splash in which Darryl Hannah's mermaid character names herself Madison after Madison Avenue.
I also learned that it's a lot of fun to tease your uptight mom by proposing to name your child after a famous porn star.
I find it amusing that at least 4 of the 5 names you just called "modern" are from the Bible. I admit, I don't know if Jared is or not.
Genesis 5:15 "When Mahalalel had lived 65 years, he became the father of Jared."
There you go. I guess "modern" wouldn't have been as good a word as "recently trendy", but I'm just a commenter, not a blogger, so I'll take a mulligan on that one.