The Twenty White Boy Names
That Best Signify High-Education Parents*
Years of mother’s education in parentheses)
1. Dov (16.50)
2. Akiva (16.42)
3. Sander (16.29)
4. Yannick (16.20)
5. Sacha (16.18)
6. Guillaume (16.17)
7. Elon (16.16)
8. Ansel (16.14)
9. Yonah (16.14)
10. Tor (16.13)
11. Finnegan (16.13)
12. MacGregor (16.10)
13. Florian (15.94)
14. Zev (15.92)
15. Beckett (15.91)
16. Kia (15.90)
17. Ashkon (15.84)
18. Harper (15.83)
19. Sumner (15.77)
20. Calder (15.75)
If many names on the above lists were unfamiliar to you, don’t feel bad. Even boys’ names—which have always been scarcer than girls’—have been proliferating wildly. This means that even the most popular names today are less popular than they used to be. Consider the ten most popular names given to black baby boys in California in 1990 and then in 2000. The top ten in 1990 includes 3,375 babies (18.7 percent of those born that year), while the top ten in 2000 includes only 2,115 (14.6 percent of those born that year).
Most Popular Black Boy Names (Number of occurrences in parentheses)
1990
1. Michael (532)
2. Christopher (531)
3. Anthony (395)
4. Brandon (323)
5. James (303)
6. Joshua (301)
7. Robert (276)
8. David (243)
9. Kevin (240)
10. Justin (231)
2000
1. Isaiah (308)
2. Jordan (267)
3. Elijah (262)
4. Michael (235)
5. Joshua (218)
6. Anthony (208)
7. Christopher (169)
8. Jalen (159)
9. Brandon (148)
10. Justin (141)
In the space of ten years, even the most popular name among black baby boys (532 occurrences for Michael) became far less popular (308 occurrences for Isaiah). So parents are plainly getting more diverse with names. But there’s another noteworthy shift in these lists: a very quick rate of turnover. Note that four of the 1990 names (James, Robert, David, and Kevin) fell out of the top ten by 2000. Granted, they made up the bottom half of the 1990 list. But the names that replaced them in 2000 weren’t bottom dwellers. Three of the new names—Isaiah, Jordan, and Elijah—were in fact numbers one, two, and three in 2000. For an even more drastic example of how quickly and thoroughly a name can cycle in and out of use, consider the ten most popular names given to white girls in California in 1960 and then in 2000.
Most Popular White Girl Names
1960
1. Susan
2. Lisa
3. Karen
4. Mary
5. Cynthia
6. Deborah
7. Linda
8. Patricia
9. Debra
10. Sandra
2000
1. Emily
2. Hannah
3. Madison
4. Sarah
5. Samantha
6. Lauren
7. Ashley
8. Emma
9. Taylor
10. Megan
Not a single name from 1960 remains in the top ten. But, you say, it’s hard to stay popular for forty years. So how about comparing today’s most popular names with the top ten from only twenty years earlier?
Most Popular White Girl Names
1980
1. Jennifer
2. Sarah
3. Melissa
4. Jessica
5. Christina
6. Amanda
7. Nicole
8. Michelle
9. Heather
10. Amber
2000
1. Emily
2. Hannah
3. Madison
4. Sarah
5. Samantha
6. Lauren
7. Ashley
8. Emma
9. Taylor
10. Megan
A single holdover: Sarah. So where do these Emilys and Emmas and Laurens all come from? Where on earth did Madison come from? It’s easy enough to see that new names become very popular very fast—but why?
Let’s take another look at a pair of earlier lists. Here are the most popular names given to baby girls in the 1990s among low-income families and among families of middle income or higher.
Most Common “High-End” White Girl Names in the 1990s
1. Alexandra
2. Lauren
3. Katherine
4. Madison
5. Rachel
Most Common “Low-End” White Girl Names in the 1990s
1. Amber
2. Heather
3. Kayla
4. Stephanie
5. Alyssa
Notice anything? You might want to compare these names with the “Most Popular White Girl Names” list on page 199, which includes the top ten overall names from 1980 and 2000. Lauren and Madison, two of the most popular “high-end” names from the 1990s, made the 2000 top ten list. Amber and Heather, meanwhile, two of the overall most popular names from 1980, are now among the “lowend” names.
There is a clear pattern at play: once a name catches on among high-income, highly educated parents, it starts working its way down the socioeconomic ladder. Amber and Heather started out as high-end names, as did Stephanie and Brittany. For every high-end baby named Stephanie or Brittany, another five lower-income girls received those names within ten years.
So where do lower-end families go name-shopping? Many people assume that naming trends are driven by celebrities. But celebrities actually have a weak effect on baby names. As of 2000, the pop star Madonna had sold 130 million records worldwide but hadn’t generated even the ten copycat namings—in California, no less—required to make the master index of four thousand names from which the sprawling list of girls’ names on page 227 was drawn. Or considering all the Brittanys, Britneys, Brittanis, Brittanies, Brittneys, and Brittnis you encounter these days, you might think of Britney Spears. But she is in fact a symptom, not a cause, of the Brittany/Britney/Brittani/ Brittanie/Brittney/Brittni explosion. With the most common spelling of the name, Brittany, at number eighteen among high-end families and number five among low-end families, it is surely approaching its pull date. Decades earlier, Shirley Temple was similarly a symptom of the Shirley boom, though she is often now remembered as its cause. (It should also be noted that many girls’ names, including Shirley, Carol, Leslie, Hilary, Renee, Stacy, and Tracy began life as boys’ names, but girls’ names almost never cross over to boys.)
So it isn’t famous people who drive the name game. It is the family just a few blocks over, the one with the bigger house and newer car. The kind of families that were the first to call their daughters Amber or Heather and are now calling them Lauren or Madison. The kind of families that used to name their sons Justin or Brandon and are now calling them Alexander or Benjamin. Parents are reluctant to poach a name from someone too near—family members or close friends—but many parents, whether they realize it or not, like the sound of names that sound “successful.”
But as a high-end name is adopted en masse, high-end parents begin to abandon it. Eventually, it is considered so common that even lower-end parents may not want it, whereby it falls out of the rotation entirely. The lower-end parents, meanwhile, go looking for the next name that the upper-end parents have broken in.
So the implication is clear: the parents of all those Alexandras, Laurens, Katherines, Madisons, and Rachels should not expect the cachet to last much longer. Those names are already on their way to overexposure. Where, then, will the new high-end names come from?