How popular is the baby name May in the United States right now? How popular was it historically? Find out using the graph below! Plus, check out all the blog posts that mention the name May.
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I’ve posted about sextuplets and octuplets before, but never septuplets!
A set of seven — four boys and three girls — was born in Des Moines, Iowa, to Kenny and Bobbi McCaughey on November 19, 1997. The McCaughey septuplets are the world’s first surviving set of septuplets.
What are the names of all seven? Here are their firsts and middles:
Kenneth Robert
Alexis May
Natalie Sue
Kelsey Ann
Nathan Roy
Brandon James
Joel Steven
The McCaugheys also have an older daughter named Mikayla Marie (b. 1996).
What are your thoughts on the names? If you were having a set of seven (same mix of genders), which names would you choose?
In March of 1995, Richard and Lorine June of Florida welcomed their third child — another baby girl.
Their first daughter was named Nicole, and their second was named Brooke. For the third, they went with “April May” to create the full legal name “April May June.”
The idea first occurred to them when Nicole was born. [Lorine] recounted that her husband said, “Wouldn’t that be funny?”
“And I said, “No, we better not do that,'” she recalled.
A couple of babies later, though, they changed their minds. “It gets harder to think of names as you go on,” Lorine admitted.
Richard’s father Ralph believed it was inevitable. “With a name like June, it was bound to happen sooner or later,” he said.
Back when sea voyages were the only way to reach distant lands, many babies ended up being born aboard ships. And many of these ship-born babies were given names that reflected the circumstances of their birth. A good portion of them, for instance, were named after the ships upon which they were born.
I’ve gathered hundreds of these ship-inspired baby names over the years, and I think it’s finally time to post what I’ve found…
A
Abergeldie:
Emma Abergeldie Walsh, born in 1884
Abernyte:
Eva Abernyte Congdon, born in 1875
Abington:
Herbert Bealie Abington Tait, born in 1884
Abyssinia:
Abyssinia Louise Juhansen, born in 1870
Abyssinia Elfkin, born in 1872
Louise Abyssinia Bellanger, born in 1874
Achilles:
John Achilles Denchey, born in 1871
Actoea:
U. Actoea Jones, born in 1868
Adriatic:
John Adriatic Gateley Collins, born in 1879
Adriatic O’Loghlin Gould, born in 1880
Agnes Adriatic Cook, born in 1880
Agamemnon:
Frederick Agamemnon Dingly, born in 1876
Alaska:
Mary Alaska Magee, born in 1884
Alcester:
Gertrude Alcester Dart, born in 1884
Alcinous:
Mary Duncan Alcinosa Greenwood, born in 1887
Aldergrove:
Aldergrove Andrew Fullarton Feathers, born in 1875
He in turn gave his name to Medford, Minnesota, in the 1850s. His father, Englishman William K. Colling, was an early Minnesota settler who “said that he had a son who was born on board the ship Medford, and was named Medford, in honor of the ship, and proposed that the town should be named Medford in honor of the boy.”
I recently updated my old anagram baby names post to make it much more comprehensive. As I worked on it, though, I noticed that many of those sets of names had obvious similarities, such as the same first letters and/or the same rhythm.
So I thought I’d make a second, shorter list of anagram names that were less conspicuously similar. Specifically, I wanted the second list to feature sets of names with different first letters and different numbers of syllables.
And that’s what you’ll find below — pairs of anagram names that are relatively distinct from one another. So much so that, at first glance (or listen), some might not even strike you as being anagrammatic at all. :)
Click on any name to check out its popularity graph…
Most of the names above have a clear number of syllables, but a few do not. (I categorized them according to my own interpretation/accent.) So, if you’re interested in using any of these pairings, just remember to test the names out loud first!
The Eiffel Tower was created by civil engineer Gustave Eiffel for the Paris Exposition of 1889 (which marked the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution). It took more than two years to construct and was the tallest man-made structure in the world until 1930.
We’ve already talked about one person named Eiffel Tower, and, since then, I’ve found a second Eiffel Tower. If we do a records search for the name Eiffel, though, we find dozens more. “Eiffel” was never common enough in the U.S. to appear in the SSA data, but I see Eiffels as early as 1889 in the SSDI, and as early as 1887 (the year construction began*) in vital records.
Here are the best-documented, U.S.-born Eiffels I found from the last years of the 1880s and the first years of the 1890s. Two-thirds of them are female.
Did you know that Gustave Eiffel’s surname at birth was actually Bönickhausen?
In the early 1700s, Gustave’s ancestor Jean-Rene Bönickhausen relocated from a town in the mountainous Eifel region of Germany to the capital of France and began going by Eiffel (perhaps because it was easier to pronounce than Bönickhausen). So the official surname of this branch of the family tree became “Bönickhausen, dit Eiffel.” Gustave didn’t legally shorten it to Eiffel until 1879.
The word “Eifel” can be traced back to the Early Middle Ages, but the etymology is unknown.
What are your thoughts on Eiffel as a first name? Would you use it?
*The Eiffel Tower was being mentioned in the newspapers was early as mid-1886, but the name wasn’t set yet; it was being called things like “the Great Tower,” “the Tower of Paris,” and “the Eiffel Tall Tower.”
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