Monday, May 26, 2014

Girls' Top 100 of 2013 (preliminary)

I've been working on arranging the top 7000 by spelling, like I do every year. Here are the top 100 names for girls so far (I will probably go through and tweak the list, but things probably won't change too much)

rankNamerank change
1Sophia0
2Emma+1
3Olivia+1
4Isabella-2
5Emily0
6Ava0
7Mia+5
8Zoey0
9Abigail0
10Aubrey+1
11Chloe-4
12Madison-2
13Madelyn+1
14Layla+3
15Arianna+5
16Riley+3
17Kaylee-4
18Aaliyah-3
19Avery+5
20Amelia+7
21Lily-5
22Addison-1
23Elizabeth0
24Adalynn+29
25Hailey-7
26Natalie-4
27Brooklyn-2
28Charlotte+13
29Mackenzie-1
30Evelyn+6
31Lillian-1
32Allison-3
33Ella-7
34Hannah0
35Peyton-3
36Harper+10
37Kylie-5
38Elena0
39Aria+26
40Maya-1
41Kaitlyn-10
42Leah-5
43Grace+2
44Makayla-9
45Victoria+4
46Camila+5
47Katherine-3
48Sarah-5
49Anna-2
50Gabriella-2
51Samantha-1
52Scarlett+16
53Jocelyn-1
54Brianna-14
55Liliana0
56Alyssa-14
57Savannah0
58Audrey+2
59Isabelle-1
60London+9
61Jasmine-7
62Nevaeh-6
63Kennedy+11
64Annabelle+11
65Lyla-3
66Mila+28
67Nora+19
68Bailey-9
69Claire-6
70Juliana-6
71Alexis-11
72Sadie+67
73Kaelyn-6
74Eliana+9
75Reagan-3
76Genesis0
77Serenity+1
78Skylar+10
79Amaya-2
80Paisley+24
81Melanie-1
82Kayla-11
83Ashley-17
84Callie+7
85Taylor-15
86Adriana+14
87Penelope+72
88Ellie+13
89Caroline+20
90Jordyn-11
91Bella-6
92Alexa-8
93Lucy+2
94Gianna-12
95Lauren-14
96Violet+21
97Vivian+14
98Sophie-25
99Naomi-6
100Autumn+2

Names that dropped out of the top 100:
Aniyah
Carly
Julia
Kaydence
Kendall
Maci
Stella
Sydney
Names that were added to the top 100:
Autumn
Caroline
Violet
Vivian
Paisley
Penelope
Ellie
Sadie

Monday, May 19, 2014

This time of the year again!

The Social Security Administration released its top names for 2013! I have been working tirelessly to arrange them by spelling. Every year that I do this has its own unique challenges, or maybe every year I get hung up on one name. This year I have noticed that the name Journey has gotten a slight boost in popularity for girls. It now has 21 spellings: 

Journey 950, Journee 587, Jurnee 283, Journi 126, Journie 112, Journei 87, Journii 20, Jernee 19, Jurni 18, Jurnie 17, Jerney 17, Jurney 16, Journe 10, Journiee 9, Jernie 9, Jerni 8, Jurnei 6, Journye 5, Jernei 5, Jurnii 5, and Jhournee 5

Also, the name Arabella/Arabelle has gotten a lot of new spellings as well as a popularity boost. This may be due to a baby Arabella on the tv series Teen Mom 3, as well as influence from Ivanka Trump's naming a baby Arabella in 2011. 

More to come as I get further down the list!

Names and sounds:

If you look at the etymology of names, you can see how certain names have come to be, but to an outsider unfamiliar to the language, what makes an English name sound masculine or feminine?

I've been specifically thinking about rhyming names.

Girls: Doris, Chloris, Loris (in use in the USA in the early 20th century)
Boys: Norris, Boris, Morris, Horace

Why aren't Toris or Voris names? Thoris sounds kind of cool; someone should use it if they haven't already.

Girls: Carrie (although Cary and Carey sometimes are used for boys), Mary, Sherry, Fairy (used in late 19th-early 20th century)
Boys: Barry, Gary, Harry, Jerry, Larry

Perry and Terry can go either way. I've seen Derry/Dary as a short form of both Deirdre and Daryl/Darren.

Why aren't Narry or Sarry names? Would they be masculine or feminine? English doesn't seem to have any strict conventions about endings on names that point specifically to genders. Sure, most names ending in -a are feminine, but then you have all the Biblical names like Jonah, Noah, and Joshua, which sound perfectly fine for boys.

Darragh is a boys' name in Ireland. Dara is mostly feminine in the USA, as are Sarah, Cara, Mara, Lara, Farrah, Tara, and Zara. Now, you can pinpoint all the origins of these names, most of them come from different places (i.e., Sarah is biblical, Lara is a Russian short form of the Greek Larisa), but they are all commonly used in English. Americans have cherry-picked the names from other cultures/Languages that they liked to use and the -ara sound sounds good to our ears. We have even coined new names based on this sound, resulting in Shara and Jerra. Why not Para or Vara?

These are the things I think about when I can't sleep.