One-Hit Wonder Baby Names

unique baby names, one hit wonder baby names, interesting baby names, pop culture baby names

These names came, then they went…and they never came back!

Here are all the one-hit wonder baby names that I’ve written about so far.

These particular names are “full list” one-hit wonders, not “top 1,000” one-hit wonders. That is, they’ve only ever popped up once in all the publicly available U.S. baby name data, which accounts for all names given to at least 5 babies per year nationally.

None of these (outside of several of the 1989 glitch-names) have ever appeared in the U.S. top 1,000.

1890s

1900s

(none yet)

1910s

1920s

1930s

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s

As I write about other one-hits, I’ll add the links to this page. (Names without links represent posts that are written, but not live on the blog yet.)

For more one-hit wonders that I’ve mentioned but not really written about yet, check out the lists of top one-hit wonders, year by year, top one-hit wonders overall for girls, and top one-hit wonders overall for boys.

How many one-hit wonders are there in the data overall? Here are some statistics:

Decade One-Hit Girl Names One-Hit Boy Names
1880s 7 8
1890s 23 7
1900s 26 5
1910s 466 360
1920s 708 521
1930s 280 188
1940s 238 109
1950s 412 194
1960s 626 168
1970s 1,340 532
1980s 1,500 732
1990s 2,363 1,311
2000s 3,412 2,242
2010-2015 3,025 2,140

Send me a note if you have any questions or suggestions, or if there’s a particular one-hit wonder name you know of that you’d like me to write about.

*Demoted! No longer a one-hit wonder; has since popped up on the charts at least one more time.