Nomenclature
The Name Voyager is a cool java app that lets you see graphically the change in name popularity over time.
See also the Baby Name Wizard blog, which’ll tell you things like:
The odd part is, Adolph does not show a precipitous drop in the 1940s. Our intuition tells us it should, but in fact the name was already disappearing before then. The use of Adolph in America dropped 80% from 1900 to 1930, then slowly trickled off into oblivion by the late ’60s. This is not to say that war with Germany played no part in the name’s demise…but rather that we’re looking at the wrong war.
In the 1890s and 1900s, German names were wildly popular with American parents. (Irish names play the same role today, so think of Gertrude as the Caitlin of her day.) With the dawn of the First World War, that generation of German hit names melted away. Try loading up the NameVoyager and typing Adolph. Then try Gertrude and Otto, and see how remarkably similar the patterns look. By and large, the more distinctly German the name, the faster it plummeted. The spelling Adolf disappeared completely during WWI along with names like Ernst and Ludwig.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that Adolph took so long to vanish from our shores. It’s hard to imagine an American family circa 1950 naming a son Adolph, yet a good number did. The name was still close enough to its popularity peak that many parents still had Grandpa Adolphs, or other positive personal associations with the name. Half a century later, Adolph is virtually taboo and will doubtless remain that way…even as Otto prepares for a comeback.
(via Jerry Kindall)
Cool application. Useful fodder for historical fiction, too, if you're looking for typical names for a given age and time period. Shame it doesn't go back at least a few decades into the 19th century.
A few years back, just for amusement, I cataloged all of the first names in my high school yearbook (class of 1986, 267 graduates). These were people who were mostly born in 1968.
The most common boys' names: Michael, John, David, Paul, Brian.
The most common girls' names: Karen, Kathleen, Lisa, Margaret, Christine and variants thereof.
Of course the choices of names were certainly biased by it being a Catholic school. Margaret was not a very common name in the general population, but still pretty traditional among Irish Catholic families.
Posted by Jimcat on February 17 2005 05:33
German? My name is Italian. It means "eight."
Posted by Otto on February 21 2005 06:34