Time’s 1937 Homage to Winner mentions:

Many an ante-bellum baby was named after Hally, the fictitious girl over whom the song moons:

I’m dreaming now of Hally, sweet Hally, sweet Hally,
I’m dreaming now of Hally,
For the thought of her is one that never dies.

The name is spelled “Hally” in Time and in sheet music from 1856, but spelled “Hallie” in other sources, like Music of the Civil War Era by Steven H. Cornelius. Regardless, it always rhymes with the word “valley,” which appears in the next line. It’s a pet form of Harriet, Henrietta and related names.

I’m not sure what kind of impact “Listen to the Mocking Bird” had on baby names in the mid-1800s, but Hallie was used regularly as a baby name in the late 1800s and early 1900s according to Social Security Administration data. (The spelling Hally never charted.)

P.S. Want to hear the song? Here’s Tom Roush’s version of Listen to the Mocking Bird, via YouTube.

Honey
Honey was the 190th most popular baby girl name on the list. Parents have also been using alternative spellings of Honey, and throwing (pouring?) Honey into compound names. Here are all the Honeys I spotted:

• Honey (278 babies)
• Honey-Rose (8)
• Honey-May (6)
• Hunnie (6)
• Honey-Mae (4)
• Hunni (4)
• Hunny (4)
• Honey-Marie (3)

They honey-names don’t even account for a tenth of a percent of all the baby girls in the data set, so I wouldn’t call them trendy. But they’re definitely on the radar.

Can’t say I’m on board with Honey. To me, honey is either a term of endearment or something I use in my tea. I like it for dogs and cats, but not for humans. (Would make a great stripper name, though.)

Honey has never charted here in the U.S., but I have seen it on birth announcements before.

Brandon-Lee
Lee was a very common second element in compound names for both genders. Despite this, I’d bet at least a few of the baby Brandon-Lees I saw were named specifically for Brandon Lee, the actor who died while filming cult favorite The Crow (1994). Here are the numbers:

• Brandon-Lee (23 babies)
• Brandonlee (4)
• Brandon-Leigh (3)

The only “-Lee” names to rank higher than Brandon-Lee were Jayden-Lee (29), Harvey-Lee (26), and Tommy-Lee (26).

Source: Office for National Statistics

Why am I posting old news? Because I recently found a more complete version of the 2008 list that goes all the way down to baby names used in England and Wales just three times. So, the top-ranked names may be old news, but the rest are new. (New to me, anyway.) Here goes:

And now, just for fun, let’s compare usage in England to usage in America:

*By UK, I mean England and Wales. Not an accurate substitution, I know. But “England and Wales” is just way too long for that spot.
**The 1,000th name on the U.S. top 1,000 was used for 192 baby boys. So the question marks represent some number between 0 and 192.
***Update: Kelly has astutely pointed out that raw numbers can be misleading. I’m not going to change the chart — I’m just too lazy — but I’ve thrown in some rough totals, for context.

Source: Office for National Statistics

• Kain, a male character from the Legacy of Kain series.
• Rinoa, a female character from Final Fantasy VIII.
• Kairi, a female character from Kingdom Hearts.
• Raiden, a male character from Mortal Kombat.

I’ve seen Raiden used as a baby name several times. Too bad it’s impossible to tell which Raidens were named after the character and which were simply given a variant of Aidan, or Jayden, or Caden…

Have you met any babies with these names before? (If so, do you know if their parents are gamers?)

*Possibly after American football player Edgerrin James.
**These kids need to have a play date together one day.
***Joviale is French for jovial.

Update – Just discovered that Ericlindross is also on the list. It’s a boy name. Looks like it was inspired by former NHL player Eric Lindros.

P.S. Here is last year’s post on baby names in Alberta.

Source: Service Alberta

The answer I found in an Ancestry.com press release is 49%:

Out of the 49 percent of Americans bearing the name of an ancestor, approximately one-third were named after their father, around 17 percent were named for their grandfather, and an estimated 15 percent were named for their grandmother. More men than women were named after a family member; in fact, 20 percent of men were given both their first and middle name after a family member, according to the Ancestry.com survey.

According to the same press release, the percentage of parents who have given a family name to one of their children is even higher:

Ancestry.com found that 57 percent of parents named a child after a family member. Nearly 20 percent of those parents who chose a family name did so because it was a name that had been passed down in the family through generations.

I don’t like using press releases as sources of information, but these are the only numbers I’ve been able to come up with so far. Have you seen any other reports on the proportion of babies named for family members?

Source: Ancestry.com

Mary Ann makes things tricky, doesn’t it? Elizabeth took the top spot, but if you lump Mary and Mary Ann together, the total (1,847,203) trumps Elizabeth’s total by a wide margin (679,553). In my mind, this gives Mary a strong case for being declared the true #1 name. What do you think?

Source: Daily Mail

What I didn’t like: “She’s going to play a sport or I will die trying.” Spoken by a sports-crazed mom about her 11-year-old daughter, Kobe, who “likes the originality of her name but didn’t inherit a sliver of her mother’s enthusiasm for the sport.”

What I did like: That the author didn’t gloss over the drawbacks of this name. He talked about mini-Kobes who were teased after the Lakers lost to the Celtics in the 2008 NBA Finals. He mentioned the parents of mini-Kobes who experienced “second thoughts” about the name after Bryant was accused of rape in 2003.

If you know someone who is thinking about using Kobe as a baby name — or any distinctive celebrity name as a baby name — send them a link to the article: Naming kids Kobe becomes common.

“Something happened when children under 5 became a market, maybe around 1983, with things like Baby Gap,” said Christine Farina, associate professor of communication at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. “We became more conscious of each other at the same time. You wanted an upscale, slightly different name, but not too different. Gap, Williams-Sonoma, all these types of places that affected pseudo-sophistication made the difference. So that is the change from, say, Michaels and Jameses everywhere, and more Jacobs and Emmas and Joshuas.”

Christine Farina is “Stockton’s video production professor,” according to the faculty web page. I have no idea how a background in filmmaking qualifies her to talk about baby names.

And some of her dates/claims don’t match up. Joshua and Jacob were already popular in the 1970s. Michael is the #2 name in the country–still “everywhere,” I’d say. Gap didn’t launch the babyGap line until 1990. (They did have GapKids in the 1980s, though.)

Despite this, I do like her theory. Not the wording of her theory–I’m pretty sure we were all fully “conscious of each other” long before 1983–but the idea behind it. It seems plausible to me that baby name trends could be influenced by retail trends in the way she (sort of) describes.

I just wish she’d offered some solid evidence to back it up.

Source: Examining the shifting trends in baby names

The first was born in Scotland last year. The second was born in Plymouth, New Hampshire on New Year’s Day.

It’s time for an intervention. If you’re an expectant TwiHard who believes Renesmee might just make a good baby name, please stop and think about these questions first:

• “Renesmee” is rather inelegant, isn’t it? Yes it is. In fact, it’s a car crash. Stephenie Meyer was at the wheel, and she took out innocent bystanders Renée and Esmé. If you like the sounds in the name, why not untangle it and use Renée Esmé or Esmé Renée as a first-middle pairing? You could also hyphenate (e.g. Renée-Esmé) and use the combination as either a first or a middle name.
• What’s wrong with all the other female names in Twilight? Nothing at all. So how about Isabella/Bella? Rosalie? Alice? Heidi? Leah? Katrina/Kate? Esmé (on its own)? Renée (on its own)? These names weren’t invented for–and therefore won’t always be associated with–Twilight. And that’s a good thing.
• Is the name of a fictitious vampire/human hybrid baby in a poorly written YA book really more important to you than, say, a family name? I hope not. Try using the Renesmee formula instead of the name itself. If the baby’s grandmothers are named Anne and Isabel, for instance, try Annabella. If you’d like to honor Aunt Jennifer and Aunt Jessica, combine them to create Jennica.

Naming under the influence can be dangerous. Please forward this to anyone you know who, due to a Twilight addiction, may be considering giving the name Renesmee to a real-life, non-vampire baby.

(In the meanwhile, let me know if you hear about or meet any other babies named Renesmee.)