How popular is the baby name Oakley 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 Oakley.
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While we wait for the latest batch of U.S. baby name data from the SSA, let’s check out Wyoming’s 2023 rankings (which were released about a week ago).
Last year, the Equality State — the 10th-largest state in terms of area, but the 50th-largest in terms of population — welcomed 5,989 babies.
What were the top names among these babies? Evelyn and Henry, according to the Wyoming Department of Health.
Here are Wyoming’s top 10 girl names and top 10 boy names of 2023:
Girl names
Evelyn
Amelia
Olivia
Harper
Charlotte
Hazel
Eleanor
Lainey
Oakley
Aurora
Boy names
Henry
Jack (tie)
Wyatt (tie)
Elijah
Carter
Asher
Theodore
Benjamin
Waylon
Noah
Lainey was likely popularized by country singer Lainey Wilson. We’ll have to keep an eye on that one in the national rankings.
In 2022, Wyoming’s top names were Charlotte and Noah.
P.S. We’ve also seen official 2023 rankings for Virginia, Sonoma County (California), Knox County (Illinois), Johnston County (North Carolina), Boston (Massachusetts), and Nantucket (also Massachusetts) — plus rankings based on provisional data for Rhode Island, Mississippi, New Mexico, Arizona, and Houston (Texas).
Possible explanations/associations for several of the above:
Pollaidh comes from the name of the Scottish mountain Stac Pollaidh (pronounced “stack polly”). The Scottish name is based on the Norse name for the mountain, Stakkr Pollå, which means “the pinnacle of the pool river.”
Senga could be Agnes backwards…or it could be based on the Scottish word seang, meaning “slender.” (Here’s a post about Scotland’s Senga syndrome.)
Talorcan is a Pictish name that belonged to several Pictish kings. It’s often spelled Talorgan.
Welwitschia (pronounced vel-VIH-chee-uh) is the name of a genus of plants that includes a single species, Welwitschia mirabilis, endemic to the Namib desert in Africa. The genus was named after Austrian physician/botanist Friedrich Welwitsch (1806-1872).
Here’s what Welwitschia mirabilis — often referred to as a “living fossil” — looks like:
(I haven’t been this fascinated by a science-y baby name since Petrichor popped up in Alberta in 2016!)
Finally, here are Scotland’s 2022 rankings, if you’d like to compare last year to the year before.
We know which names debuted most impressively in the U.S. baby name data, but what about the baby names that returned most impressively? That is, the names that re-emerged in the data (after an absence of at least one year) with the highest number of babies?
Below are the most popular re-emerging names for every single year on record, after the second.
Here’s the format: Girl names are on the left, boy names are on the right, and the numbers represent single-year usage (following an absence). In 1971, for instance, the girl name Devonia returned to the data with 22 babies, and the boy name Idris returned to the data with 21 babies.
(The Social Security Administration’s baby name data isn’t perfect, but it does get a lot more accurate starting in the late 1930s because, according to the SSA, “many people born before 1937 never applied for a Social Security card, so their names are not included in our data.”)
I’ve already written about some of these names, and I’ll write about others in the future. In the meantime, feel free to beat me to it! Leave a comment and let us know what popularized Jory in 1950, or Marnita in 1961, or Catlin in 1984…
Which unisex baby names were the most popular in 2022?
To figure this out, I did two things. First, I identified all the gender-neutral names in the latest batch of U.S. baby name data. (To qualify as gender-neutral, a name must be given to girls at least one-third of the time and to boys at least one-third of the time.) Second, I sorted those hundreds of gender-neutral names by total usage: male plus female.
The following names came out on top:
Parker
River
Charlie
Blake
Emerson
Finley
Phoenix
Remington
Tatum
Rory
Dakota
Ari
Shiloh
Alexis
Armani
Remy
Salem
Legacy
Skyler
Denver
The first four names — Parker, River, Charlie, and Blake — were also the top four in 2021.
The five names that entered the top 20 were Shiloh, Salem, Legacy, Skyler, and Denver. Four of the five qualified as unisex in 2021, but ranked lower on the list. Legacy, on the other hand, was slightly over two-thirds male in 2021.
The five names that dropped out of the top 20 were Hayden, Amari, Oakley, Reign, and Milan. All five failed to qualify as unisex in 2022. Hayden, Amari and Milan were given to too many boys; Oakley and Reign were given to too many girls.
Here are those top 20 names again, this time with total counts and gender percentages:
Number of babies*
Percentage girls
Percentage boys
Parker
6,243
38.49%
61.51%
River
5,379
35.55%
64.45%
Charlie
4,420
52.53%
47.47%
Blake
3,014
47.81%
52.19%
Emerson
2,975
57.61%
42.39%
Finley
2,571
52.74%
47.26%
Phoenix
2,335
43.08%
56.92%
Remington
2,217
35.14%
64.86%
Tatum
2,202
52.32%
47.68%
Rory
2,181
43.83%
56.17%
Dakota
2,137
56.34%
43.66%
Ari
1,736
41.24%
58.76%
Shiloh
1,543
59.82%
40.18%
Alexis
1,533
56.69%
43.31%
Armani
1,496
46.86%
53.14%
Remy
1,411
35.08%
64.92%
Salem
1,087
63.75%
36.25%
Legacy
1,000
65.00%
35.00%
Skyler
973
58.38%
41.62%
Denver
963
33.33%
66.67%
*Male and female usage added together
So which names came next on the list?
The following, ranked 21st through 35th, all fell within both the girls’ top 1,000 and the boys’ top 1,000 in 2022:
Briar, 924 total babies
Azariah, 903
Drew, 896
Amiri, 880
Bellamy, 847
Ocean, 842
Jamie, 841
Sevyn, 792
Dior, 745
Chandler, 719
Tru, 710
Murphy, 709
Layne, 702
Justice, 643
Robin, 637
And here are the rest of the unisex names that had a combined usage of at least 200 babies (in descending order):
Kacey was one of the few names that happened to hit 50/50 usage — exactly 202 baby girls and 202 baby boys — in 2022. Movie-fueled Marvel was another 50/50 name.
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