Nameberry.com just dropped their annual list of popular baby names, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t more than a little bit excited that one of them is shared by a Beyonce twin. But perhaps what’s even more exciting is that there are some new contenders, for once, with parents choosing to move away “from family names and traditional male choices” and instead naming their boys in much the same fashion they name their girls— “with style the driving factor.”
In other words, girls have generally been named by what sounds nice and boys by what Sounds Right, traditionally speaking. But this year’s list “is more volatile on the boys’ side,” with a bunch of new entries and “dramatic shifts” in the name-ladder, as far as dramatic shifts in name trends go. Add this one to the list: Millennials are ruining babies! Yeehaw!
The list quantifies ‘popularity’ by measuring which names attract the largest share of the site’s nearly 250 million page views versus how many babies actually receive that name. It is a fairly solid gauge of how interested parents are in certain names as well as a predictor of future name popularity.
Atticus leapt to first place on the boys’ list and Olivia held down the top spot for girls for the second year in a row.
Three new names vaulted onto the Top Ten this year for each gender: Cora, Maia, and Amara for girls, and Theodore, Jasper, and Henry for boys.
Besides Maia, these are the new entries on the girls’ side: Rumi, the name of Beyonce and Jay-Z’s baby daughter, (!!!) Alexandra, Allegro, Brielle, Celeste, and Elena.
There are almost twice as many new names on the boys’ side, including: Adam, Augustus, Caspian, Charlie, Dante, Edward, Emmett, Everett, Ian, Jonathan, Kane, Kian, Magnus, Maverick, Rhett, Winston, and Xander.