How popular is the baby name Finch in the United States right now? How popular was it historically? Use the popularity graph and data table below to find out! Plus, see all the blog posts that mention the name Finch.
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Which girl names emerged in the U.S. baby name data in 2022 for the first time ever?
A total of 676 girl names debuted in the data last year, and the most impressive debut was made by Jazaiyah. Here are the top debuts overall:
Jazaiyah, 46 baby girls
Yahritza, 44
Rhaenyra, 31
Brisley, 29
Navany, 28
Jhersi, 27
Aidanna, 22
Soleen, 21
Jeizy, 20
Aizal, 19
Yasani, 19
Ayuri, 15
Kheumani, 15
Yasaniy, 15
Lextyn, 14
Yahritza could be from the band Yahritza y Su Esencia, which was nominated for a couple of Latin Grammy Awards last year. And Rhaenyra is no doubt from Rhaenyra Targaryen, the character from House of the Dragon (the Game of Thrones prequel).
Debani, Debahni, and all similar names are spelling variants of Debanhi, one of the fastest-rising girl names of 2022. (“Nogivenname,” of course, is just a placeholder. I wonder which U.S. state it’s coming from…)
Finally, here’s a selection of the rest of the debuts:
Sersi is a character from the movie Eternals (2021), Tiabeanie is a character from the animated series Disenchantment, Nynaeve is a character from the series The Wheel of Time, and Tissaia is a character from the series The Witcher.
Apricity, intriguingly, is an obscure noun that refers to the warmth of the sun in winter. I’m not sure why parents are using at as a name now, though.
If you can explain any of the other debuts, please leave a comment!
Source: SSA
Image: Adapted from LotusBud0048a (public domain) by Frank “Fg2” Gualtieri
Keepers have named the young male Edward after Johnny Depp’s famous character, Edward Scissorhands, due to his impressive claws – which will grow up to four inches in length and enable him to cling on and climb easily through the tree-top branches of his Rainforest Life home.
I was struck by this, since Murphy and others had first described Athena’s personality to me as “feisty.” “They earn their names,” Murphy had told me. Athena is named for the Greek goddess of wisdom, war, and strategy. She is not usually a laid-back octopus, like George had been. “Athena could pull you into the tank,” Murphy had warned. “She’s curious about what you are.”
The most famous of all the Mercury chimps, due to his landmark January 1961 flight, Ham was actually not publicly called Ham until after the flight succeeded. The name by which he’s now known — an acronym for Holloman Aerospace Medical Center at the Air Force base — was only widely used when he returned safely to earth; NASA reportedly wanted to avoid bad publicity should a named (and thus a known, publicly embraced) animal be killed; all the Mercury chimps were known by numbers.
Republican Gov. Paul LePage, the state’s all-time veto champion, has named his new dog Veto.
LePage, who has earned renown for exercising his veto pen on bills he didn’t like, adopted a Jack Russell terrier mix from a shelter.
[…]
LePage chose the name Veto because his pet “is the mascot of good public policy, defender of the Maine people and protector of hardworking taxpayers from bad legislation,” his spokesman Peter Steele said.
Steele joked that the governor is going to train the dog to deliver vetoes from his office to legislative leaders.
Fans of the K-pop group NCT 127 donated money in January to name a baby pudu at the Los Angeles Zoo after one of its members, Haechan (HECH’-ehn). This week, the human Haechan got to meet his namesake, snapping selfies with the little deer at his enclosure.
Long, long ago — five years, to be precise — Jeff Owens accepted that his calls to the vet would tax his fortitude. When the person on the other end asks his name, Owens, a test scorer in Albuquerque, says, “Jeff.” When they ask for his cat’s name, he has to tell them, “Baby Jeff.” The black exotic shorthair, a wheezy female with a squashed face and soulful orange eyes, is named for Owens, says his partner, Brittany Means, whose tweet about Jeff and Baby Jeff went viral this past spring. The whole thing started as a joke several years ago, when Means started calling every newcomer to their home — the car, the couch — “Baby Jeff.” Faced with blank adoption paperwork in 2017, the couple realized that only one name would do.
Hearst put the bear on display [in 1889] in Golden Gate Park and named him Monarch. At more than 1,200 pounds, Monarch was the largest bear ever held captive.
[…]
Taking a cue from the Sonoma revolt in 1846 [after which a flag featuring a bear was created to represent the captured region], the state again decided to make the California Grizzly the flag’s focal point. Only this time they wanted a bear that actually looked like a bear.
Illustrators used the recently deceased Monarch as the model for the bear on our state flag.
(Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst took the name “Monarch” from the tagline of the San Francisco Examiner, the “Monarch of the Dailies.”)
About Pigcasso, a 450-pound painting pig in South Africa with a great name:
She’s fat, friendly and fabulous! Meet Pigcasso – the fine swine who was rescued from the brink of extinction at a South African pig ‘farm’. From pork chop to hog heaven, she loves the sweet things in life: Eat. Sleep. Eat. Repeat. She also loves to paint – and that’s no hogwash! Pigcasso’s primary purpose? To paint a better picture for farm animals.
(Titles of Pigcasso’s paintings include Grin, Vitality, Rockstar, and Brexit.)
From the description of a mid-2020 video released by the Australian Reptile Park of New South Wales:
We have a very special announcement… Our very first koala of the season has popped out of Mums pouch to say hello!
Keepers have decided to name her Ash! Ash is the first koala born at the park since the tragic Australian bushfires and is a sign of hope for the future of Australia’s native wildlife.
New Orleans dogs are often the namesakes of the cuisine (Gumbo, Roux, Beignet, Po-Boy, Boudin); the Saints (Brees, Payton, Deuce); music (Toussaint, Jazz, Satchmo); streets (Clio, Tchoupitoulas, Calliope); neighborhoods (Pearl, Touro, Gert) and Mardi Gras krewes (Zulu, Rex, Bacchus).
One cast member had very few complaints about shooting in Hawaii, never letting it get in the way of her own agenda on the set. The filmmakers found Bertha, the water buffalo that [Jack] Black’s character rides, in Texas and flew her to Kauai on a special plane. But about midway through filming, everyone was in for a big surprise. One day the trainer called us and said, Oh, by the way, Bertha can’t work because when we showed up at the corral this morning, she had a calf, recalls producer McLeod. We didn’t know she was pregnant. No one knew she was pregnant. Bertha having this baby was definitely kind of a humorous morale booster for everyone. In honor of Jack Black, the animal trainer named Bertha’s baby Little Jack.
Bears at Brooks River are assigned numbers for monitoring, management, and identification purposes. Inevitably, some bears acquire nicknames from staff and these nicknames are included in this book, but naming wild animals is not without controversy. Is it appropriate to name wild animals?
[…]
Names also carry meaning, intentionally or not. What stigmas would you attach to a young bear nicknamed Fluffy versus a large male bear named Killer? How would those stigmas alter your experience when watching that animal?
(The booklet also included the nicknames of various Katmai brown bears. For example, “Walker” had “large dark eye rings” reminiscent of zombie eyes, and “Evander” was missing part of an ear — much like Evander Holyfield after his 1997 fight with Mike Tyson.)
In England we find dogs that were named Sturdy, Whitefoot, Hardy, Jakke, Bo and Terri. Anne Boleyn, one of the wives of King Henry VIII, had a dog named Purkoy, who got its name from the French ‘pourquoi’ because it was very inquisitive.
Clara is my 2-year-old Wheaten terrier and one of several dogs in my neighborhood with a name that sounds as if it came from a shuffleboard tournament on a golden-years cruise. Among her pals, Fern is red-nose pit bull, Alfie is (mostly) a black lab and Eleanor is a mix of Bernese mountain dog and poodle.
This pack has led me to conclude that whereas we look back to remote centuries when giving children trendy names like Emma, Sebastian, Julian or Charlotte, we name our dogs after our grandparents.
[…]
This means that future generations of dogs should be prepared to be called the mom-and-dad names of today. Names like Kimberly, Jason and Heather.
From a 2019 video of Vogue editor Anna Wintour talking about her new puppy, named Finch:
She’s called Finch because we call all of our dogs after characters in To Kill a Mockingbird. So we have had a Scout, a Radley, and a Harper. And let me tell you, they are not happy about Finch’s arrival.
From a video in which rapper DRAM talks about his goldendoodle named Idnit [vid]:
The generic name “Pol” for a parrot can be traced back to England since at least the early 1600s. In his 1606 comedy Volpone, Renaissance playwright — and close friend of William Shakespeare — Ben Jonson assigned many of the characters animal personas which reflected their true nature.
[…]
Two comic relief-type characters, Sir Politic Would-Be (“Sir Pol” for short) and his wife, are visitors from England who are trying to ingratiate themselves into Venetian society, and they do so by simply mimicking the words and behavior of Volpone and his associates. Because of their endearing ignorance of what they are actually saying when they repeat phrases they’ve learned, Jonson describes them as parrots.
It is unclear whether Jonson actually coined the term “Pol” as a catch-all moniker for parrots, or if he simply popularized it. In any case, indulgent British pet owners eventually turned “Pol” into the much cutesier diminutive “Polly,” and both names made their way across the Atlantic.
Staff at the Buckinghamshire, England [animal] hospital say the gull somehow got curry or turmeric all over his feathers, which prevented him from flying properly. The bird, named Vinny after the popular Indian dish Vindaloo curry, put up a fight but eventually let the staff scrub his feathers.
From a late 2020 Zoological Society of London news release:
ZSL Whipsnade Zoo’s giraffe herd welcomed a giant six-foot-tall new arrival this week — on what has been dubbed ‘the day of hope’ by staff at the UK’s largest zoo.
The female calf was born at the same time [that] the first COVID-19 vaccine was given to 90-year-old Margaret Keenan, during the early hours of Tuesday 8 December — and in recognition of the poignant moment, the infant has been named Margaret.
From a late 2023 BBC article about a rescued turtle:
The tiny turtle was found in a pretty bad condition off the Scottish island of Iona – which she was named after – in January 2022.
Her rescuers weren’t sure if she was going to make it at first, as she is a loggerhead turtle, a tropical species that needs warm temperatures to survive.
But after almost two years of recovery in the UK and Portugal, Iona has now been released back into the ocean by marine scientists.
Images: sloth by Sophia Müller from Unsplash, flag adapted from Flag of California (public domain), bear by NPS (public domain), the album Big Baby DRAM (2016)
Canadian writer Mazo de la Roche found fame in her late 40s when her third novel, Jalna, won first prize (and $10,000) in the first “Atlantic Novel Contest” in 1927. The book was serialized in Atlantic Monthly, then released as a standalone volume.
The book’s main characters were members of the prosperous Whiteoak family. They lived at an estate in southern Ontario called Jalna. The estate had been built by family patriarch Capt. Philip Whiteoak, a retired officer of the British Army in India. He’d named it “Jalna” after the garrison town in India where he’d met his Irish wife, Adeline.
The book was a top-10 bestseller in the U.S. in both 1927 and 1928. It was such a big commercial success that the author kept writing novels about the Whiteoaks. She ended up with a total of 16 books, now known as the “Whiteoak Chronicles,” which cover four generations (1850s-1950s) of the fictional family.
Many of de la Roche’s character names — which included Finch, Pheasant, and Wakefield/”Wake” — came directly from from gravestones in Ontario’s Newmarket cemetery.
Given the popularity of the book, and the distinctiveness of the character names, it’s not too surprising that Jalna had an influence on U.S. baby name data in the ’20s and ’30s…
Alayne
Character Alayne Archer was introduced in Jalna when Eden Whiteoak, an aspiring poet, traveled to New York City to meet with a publisher. Alayne was the publisher’s assistant, and she and Eden became romantically involved.
The debut of the baby name Alayne in 1929 was due to the much-anticipated follow-up book, Whiteoaks of Jalna — specifically, to the book reviews that ran in newspapers throughout the U.S. during the second half of 1929. Many of them mentioned Alayne.
1937: 19 baby girls named Alayne
1936: 23 baby girls named Alayne
1935: 16 baby girls named Alayne
1934: 9 baby girls named Alayne
1933: 5 baby girls named Alayne
1932: 5 baby girls named Alayne
1931: 9 baby girls named Alayne
1930: 7 baby girls named Alayne
1929: 11 baby girls named Alayne [debut]
1928: unlisted
Notice how usage rose during the mid-1930s. This was due to a related reason: the movie Jalna (1935), which was based on the first book and featured actress Kay Johnson as Alayne. (By 1935, five of the 16 books were out.)
Jalna & Renny
The year after the movie came out, two more Jalna-inspired names emerged in the data. One was Jalna itself, which didn’t stick around long:
1938: unlisted
1937: 9 baby girls named Jalna
1936: 6 baby girls named Jalna [debut]
1935: unlisted
(You could compare to Jalna to Tara, the plantation in Gone with the Wind.)
The other was Renny, from Eden’s half-brother Renny Whiteoak, who became Alayne’s love interest after Alayne and Eden grew apart.
1941: 8 baby boys named Renny
1939: 5 baby boys named Renny
1937: 8 baby boys named Renny
1936: 9 baby boys named Renny [debut]
1935: unlisted
Another factor that could have given Renny a boost that year was the fifth book in the series, Young Renny, which focused on that character specifically.
…So how did Mazo de la Roche come by her own unique name?
She was born “Mazo Louise Roche” in Ontario in 1879. She added the “de la” not (necessarily) to sound noble, but to reflect the historical spelling of the family name. And here’s what she said in her autobiography about her first name:
When my father saw me he said to my mother, “Let me name this one and you may name all the others.” And so he named me and there were never any others. Mazo had been the name of a girl to whom he once had been attached.
Looking for a surname-inspired baby name with a connection to Catholicism?
Here are more than 200 options, most of which come from Catholic Englishmen martyred during the 16th and 17th centuries.
Because the goal was to include as many realistic baby names as possible, I interpreted “surname” and “saint” liberally in some cases. Xavier is not technically a surname, for instance, and many of the folks below are not yet full-fledged saints.
Abel, for Bl. Thomas Abel (d. 1540) of England.
Abbot, for Bl. Henry Abbot (d. 1597) of England.
Albert, for Bl. Federico Albert (d. 1876) of Italy.
Almond, for St. John Almond (d. 1612) of England.
Amias, for Bl. John Amias (d. 1589) of England.
Ancina, for Bl. John Juvenal Ancina (d. 1604) of Italy.
Andleby, for Bl. William Andleby (d. 1597) of England.
Aquinas, for St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) of Italy.
Arrowsmith, for St. Edmund Arrowsmith (d. 1628) of England.
Ashley, for Bl. Ralph Ashley (d. 1606) of England.
Ashton, for Ven. Roger Ashton (d. 1592) of England.
Atkinson, for Bl. Thomas Atkinson (d. 1616) of England.
Aufield, for Bl. Thomas Aufield (d. 1585) of England.
Barlow, for St. Ambrose Barlow (d. 1641) of England.
Baylon, for St. Paschal Baylon (d. 1592) of Spain.
Becket, from St. Thomas Becket (d. 1170) of England.
Beesley, for Bl. George Beesley (d. 1591) of England.
Belson, for Bl. Thomas Belson (d. 1589) of England.
Bertie, for Servant of God Andrew Bertie (d. 2008) of England/Malta.
Bertrand, for St. Louis Bertrand (d. 1581) of Spain/South America.
Bessette, for St. André Bessette (d. 1937) of Canada.
Bonzel, for Bl. Maria Theresia Bonzel (d. 1905) of Germany.
Bosco, for St. John Bosco (d. 1888) of Italy.
Bosgrave, for Bl. Thomas Bosgrave (d. 1594) of England.
Bowes, for Bl. Marmaduke Bowes (d. 1585) of England.
Briant, for St. Alexander Briant (d. 1581) of England.
Britton, for Bl. John Britton (d. 1598) of England.
Buxton, for Bl. Christopher Buxton (d. 1588) of England.
Shelley, for Bl. Edward Shelley (d. 1588) of England.
Sherwin, for St. Ralph Sherwin (d. 1581) of England.
Sherwood, for Bl. Thomas Sherwood (d. 1578) of England.
Sinclair, for Ven. Margaret Anne Sinclair (d. 1925) of Scotland.
Slade, for Bl. John Slade (d. 1583) of England.
Solanus, for St. Francis Solanus (d. 1610) of Spain.
Southwell, for St. Robert Southwell (d. 1595) of England.
Southworth, for St. John Southworth (d. 1654) of England.
Steno, for Bl. Nicolas Steno (d. 1686) of Denmark.
Spenser, for Bl. William Spenser (d. 1589) of England.
Spencer, for Ven. Ignatius Spencer (d. 1864) of England.
Stefani, for Bl. Irene Stefani (d. 1930) of Italy.
Stein, for St. Edith Stein (d. 1942) of Germany.
Stone, for St. John Stone (d. 1539) in England.
Sullivan, for Ven. John Sullivan (d. 1933) in Ireland.
Sutton, for Bl. Robert Sutton (d. 1587) of England.
Talbot, for Ven. Matt Talbot (d. 1925) of Ireland or Bl. John Talbot (d. 1600) of England.
Tansi, for Bl. Cyprian Michael Tansi (d. 1964) of Nigeria.
Taylor, for Bl. Hugh Taylor (d. 1585) of England, Francis Taylor (d. 1621) of Ireland, or Ven. Frances Margaret Taylor (d. 1900) of England.
Tezza, for Bl. Luigi Tezza (d. 1923) of Italy.
Thirkeld, for Bl. Richard Thirkeld (d. 1583) in England.
Thompson, for Bl. James Thompson (d. 1582) of England.
Thorne, for Bl. John Thorne (d. 1539) of England.
Thorpe, for Bl. Robert Thorpe (d. 1591) of England.
Tirry, for Bl. William Tirry (d. 1654) of Ireland.
Tomasi, for St. Giuseppe Maria Tomasi (d. 1713) of Italy.
Tunstall, for Bl. Thomas Tunstall (d. 1616) of England.
Turner, for Bl. Anthony Turner (d. 1679) of England.
Vega, for Servant of God Pablo Muñoz Vega (d. 1994) of Ecuador.
Venard, for St. Jean-Théophane Vénard (d. 1861) of France.
Vera, for Ven. Jacinto Vera y Durán (d. 1881) of Uruguay.
Verna, for Bl. Antonia Maria Verna (d. 1838) of Italy.
Vianney, for St. Jean Vianney (d. 1859) of France.
Ward, for St. Margaret Ward (d. 1588) of England.
Webster, for St. Augustine Webster (d. 1535) of England.
Wells, for St. Swithun Wells (d. 1591) of England.
Wharton, for Bl. Christopher Wharton (d. 1600) of England.
Whitaker, for Bl. Thomas Whitaker (d. 1646) of England.
Wilson, for Ven. Mary Jane Wilson (d. 1916) of British India.
Wright, for Bl. Peter Wright (d. 1651) of England.
Xavier, for St. Francis Xavier (d. 1552) of Spain.
Zaccaria, for St. Antonio Maria Zaccaria (d. 1539) of Italy.
Zola, for Bl. Giovanni Batista Zola (d. 1626) of Italy.
Which of the above do you like best?
And, what other saint-inspired surnames would make good baby names? I’m sure I missed a few. Let me know in the comments!
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