The History of Naming

Posted on Wednesday 4 February 2004 to Story So Far

To Tate
Happy Birthday

love from
Aunty Lou, Uncle Graeme,
Hayden, Kelda,
Carrick and Barret

XXXXXX 000000

-- inscription found on a second-hand kid's book,
dated 1986

Joshua is the new John.

Being, as I am, the last individual in the world to be ever named John, I am quite interested in the history of naming. So much so, in fact, that I have bothered to compile for your reading enjoyment an analysis of child naming trends over the past 800 years. This analysis is based on figures collected in Britain and the US and for brevity I am only looking at male names although the history of female names will no doubt become the subject of a future post.

The graphs below show the ranking order of the top twenty names over time. While ranking doesn't convey a sense of relative population sizes, names like many things follow a power law distribution. During most of the period, at least up until 1800, 25% of the male population had the top ranked name, 50% had one of the top three names and over 80% had one of the top ten names.

The period up until 1300 is one of considerable movement as many of the names which had been common before the Norman Conquest (names such as Radulf, Herbert, Hugo and Asketill) were replaced with Norman ones. After that time, however, a period of remarkable stability sets in with the top three spots being occupied by John, William, Thomas for well over five hundred years.

The Renaissance and Reformation saw the addition of new names to the top twenty, most notably the biblical name Joseph and the reassertion of the royal name Henry. Interregnum and Restoration greatly improved the fortunes of the royal name Charles while the biblical (and royal) name James made steady ground throughout the entire period.

The Industrial Revolution around the turn of the nineteenth century unquestionably produced a great deal of social dislocation and upheaval but shifts in name usage really only started to be felt towards the end of that century. While the top ten names varied little for most of this period, there was a significant decline in dominance of all of the major names. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the top ten names represented more than 80% of all male names but by 1900, this figure had dropped to less than 50%. It would continue to drop during the course of the twentieth century.

World War II saw the beginning of a trend in which all of the traditional names went into steep decline. Already by the late nineteenth century, the name Thomas had lost its place in the top three to James but John and William continued to do well right up until the end of the 1960s. They were joined by the newly resurgent Robert and Richard but the name Henry had by then completely fallen out of the top twenty.

By 1970, however, with the notable exceptions of Joseph and William, all of these names had begun falling from favour.

The twentieth century also saw the addition of several new names to the top twenty. Donald (originally a surname) was an early favourite but it quickly faded after the war. Baby Boomers made the biblical names Michael, Matthew, Daniel and David popular. The saint name Christopher also became popular at this time.

By the year 1970, the percentage of mindshare owned by the top ten had dropped still further to around 30% and the top name was now borne by only 5% of the male population.

It was in this context that yet another batch of names surged to the fore. Once again these were dominated by the names of biblical figures and saints but the old practice of adopting surnames as first names (originally as a way of preserving the mother's maiden name) finally started to produce a significant number of top twenty names.

Two observations about the current top twenty names. Firstly, many of them are already in decline. With an increase in the rate of new name invention inevitably comes an increase in name extinction and by all indications, at least half of them will not be dominant in the next decade. Secondly, they are not representative of the top names in non-American English speaking countries.

The data that I used for the post-1880 names came from the U.S. Social Security Administration and while naming trends in Britain and the Australia have followed pretty much the same pattern as in the US, the post-1970 name choices are different and reflect different recent social histories and different constellations of soap opera characters. Britain's top ten includes names like Jack, Thomas, Oliver and Benjamin while the Australian top ten contains names like Lachlan, Ethan and Liam.

The biblical name Joshua is looking like a keeper in all three countries though.

The data for the pre-1880 names came from Douglas Galbi's interesting site about names, naming and the information economy.