How popular is the baby name Aiden 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 Aiden.
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New York City, located in southeastern New York state, is the most populous city in the United States.
In 2021, New York City welcomed 99,262 babies — 48,648 girls and 50,614 boys.
What were the most popular names among these babies? Emma and Liam.
Here are New York City’s top 10 girl names and top 10 boy names of 2021:
Girl Names
Emma, 434 baby girls
Olivia
Mia
Sophia
Leah
Ava
Isabella
Amelia
Luna
Sofia
Boy Names
Liam, 703 baby boys
Noah
Ethan
Lucas
Jacob
Joseph
David
Daniel
Aiden
Benjamin
In the girls’ top 10, Luna and Sofia replaced Sarah and Chloe.
In the boys’ top 10, Benjamin replaced Alexander.
Names in the top 100 included: Grace, Lily, Violet, Aurora, Angel, Ruby, Rose, Harper, Axel, Melody, Summer, Serenity, Iris, Autumn, Jade, Chase, August, Angelina, Ivy, Eden, Goldy, Daisy, Journey, and Faith. (Genders weren’t specified, but most of these look like girl names to me.)
A few days ago, I stumbled upon a set of baby name data for Austin, Texas, for the year 2017. While it isn’t current, it does seem to be complete — so it includes hundreds of rare and single-use names (which are always fascinating!).
The data accounts for nearly 19,900 births (9,733 girls and 10,163 boys), and features nearly 6,100 names (3,431 given to girls, 2,656 given to boys).
According to this data, which comes from the City of Austin’s Open Data Portal, the top baby names in the capital of Texas five years ago were Emma and James.
Here are Austin’s top 50 girl names and top 50 boy names of 2017:
Girl Names
Emma, 98 baby girls
Isabella, 88
Olivia, 84
Mia, 81
Evelyn, 77
Sophia, 75
Ava, 73
Abigail, 59 (tie)
Charlotte, 59 (tie)
Emily, 58
Camila, 56 (tie)
Elizabeth, 56 (tie)
Harper, 53
Amelia, 52
Penelope, 51 (tie)
Sofia, 51 (tie)
Scarlett, 46
Ella, 45
Avery, 43 (tie)
Zoe, 43 (tie)
Lillian, 41
Layla, 40 (tie)
Madison, 40 (tie)
Eleanor, 39
Victoria, 38
Allison, 37
Claire, 36 (3-way tie)
Elena, 36 (3-way tie)
Luna, 36 (3-way tie)
Aria, 35 (tie)
Chloe, 35 (tie)
Ellie, 34 (tie)
Katherine, 34 (tie)
Samantha, 33
Hannah, 30 (4-way tie)
Hazel, 30 (4-way tie)
Mila, 30 (4-way tie)
Stella, 30 (4-way tie)
Leah, 29
Cora, 28 (5-way tie)
Genesis, 28 (5-way tie)
Grace, 28 (5-way tie)
Natalie, 28 (5-way tie)
Ximena, 28 (5-way tie)
Clara, 27 (3-way tie)
Eliana, 27 (3-way tie)
Ruby, 27 (3-way tie)
Audrey, 26 (tie)
Sarah, 26 (tie)
Alexa, 25 (3-way tie)
Everly, 25 (3-way tie)
Lily, 25 (3-way tie)
Boy Names
James, 104 baby boys
Noah, 85
Daniel, 83
Benjamin, 82
William, 80
Oliver, 75
Liam, 74
Alexander, 73
Sebastian, 70
Henry, 67
Elijah, 66 (tie)
Mateo, 66 (tie)
Ethan, 65
Jackson, 63
Anthony, 61
Jacob, 60
Aiden, 59 (tie)
Luke, 59 (tie)
David, 58 (tie)
Samuel, 58 (tie)
John, 56
Isaac, 55 (tie)
Julian, 55 (tie)
Michael, 54
Charles, 53 (3-way tie)
Jack, 53 (3-way tie)
Matthew, 53 (3-way tie)
Jose, 52 (tie)
Joshua, 52 (tie)
Wyatt, 50
Aaron, 49 (4-way tie)
Grayson, 49 (4-way tie)
Joseph, 49 (4-way tie)
Levi, 49 (4-way tie)
Dylan, 48
Hudson, 47
Josiah, 46 (3-way tie)
Logan, 46 (3-way tie)
Santiago, 46 (3-way tie)
Jayden, 45
Nathan, 44
Christopher, 43 (tie)
Thomas, 43 (tie)
Andrew, 42 (4-way tie)
Gabriel, 42 (4-way tie)
Luis, 42 (4-way tie)
Owen, 42 (4-way tie)
Lucas, 41
Adrian, 40 (3-way tie)
Axel, 40 (3-way tie)
Christian, 40 (3-way tie)
On the girls’ list, Allison caught my eye. It ranked 26th in Austin in 2017, but 61st nationally the same year. Interesting.
Further down on the boys’ list was Austin itself, in 95th place — vs. 75th nationally — with 21 baby boys. Much further down was Texas, with 2 baby boys.
And now it’s time for the unique names!
One-of-a-kind names were given to 24% of the baby girls and 17% of the baby boys born in Austin in 2017. Here’s a sampling of the names that were bestowed just once:
Some possible explanations/associations for a few of the above:
Cadeau is the French word for “present, gift.”
Ceiba is a type of tree.
Tsumugi Shirogane is a character from the 2017 video game Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony.
Ynafets is “Stefany” spelled backwards.
Bruges is the capital of West Flanders (a province of Belgium).
Mistral is a strong late-winter wind in southern France.
The Rigveda is a sacred Hindu text.
I’ve never posted rankings for Austin before, but I have posted rankings recently for two nearby Texas cities: Houston (which is more than twice the size of Austin, population-wise) and College Station (which is about an eighth of the size of Austin).
(…And this doesn’t even account for all the Tristan-related girl names that got a mid-’90s boost.)
So, what was the influence?
The character Tristan Ludlow (played by Brad Pitt) from the movie Legends of the Fall — a saga set in rural Montana during the early decades of the 1900s.
Tristan was the rebellious middle son of rancher Col. William Ludlow (Anthony Hopkins). He and his brothers — the older, ambitious Alfred (Aidan Quinn), and the younger, naïve Samuel (Henry Thomas) — all fell in love with the same beautiful woman, Susannah (Julia Ormond).
Released at the very end of 1994, the “big, robust Western love story” ranked #1 at the box office for four weeks straight in the early months of 1995.
Regarding Tristan Ludlow’s first name, one incredibly prescient reviewer noted that we should “look for [it] to be given to more than a few babies over the next few years.”
Tristan Ludlow didn’t end up with Susannah, but he did get married — to a Native American woman named Isabel (Karina Lombard). The name Karina saw it’s highest-ever usage in 1995, and the usage of Isabel also increased — though it was already on the rise, so there’s no telling how much of the increase was due specifically to the film.
Speaking of Isabel’s rise…
The fact that Legends of the Fall featured both a character named Isabel and an actor named Aidan, and that forms of these names (Isabella and Aiden) went on to reach the U.S. top 10 — peaking almost simultaneously a decade and a half later — is very interesting to me. It makes me wonder whether the movie’s impact on U.S. baby names wasn’t substantially greater (but also more complex?) than what the mid-’90s data would have us believe.
Isabella ranking, U.S.
Aiden ranking, U.S.
2012
3rd
10th
2011
2nd
9th*
2010
1st*
9th*
2009
1st*
12th
2008
2nd
16th
*Peak usage
(I began wondering about this after a friend of mine, who has a son named Aiden, mentioned that she’d had the name in the back of her mind ever since seeing Legends of the Fall as a teenager.)
What are your thoughts on this theory?
And, do you know anyone with a name that was inspired by Legends of the Fall?
The Washington Post recently published a pair of articles about babies whose names had been changed.
The first article mentioned that, according to SSA data, nearly 30,000 babies in the U.S. had had their names changed from January 2017 to March 2022.
The second article dug a little deeper, revealing the names that ranked highest on either side of the name-change spectrum: most-abandoned and most-adopted.
The top two names on both lists — Issac/Isaac and Chole/Chloe — clearly represent spelling corrections.
And my guess is that at least a portion of the boys named “Conner” had their names changed to the more common spelling “Connor.” (Connor has been a top-100 boy name since the early 1990s.)
My favorite thing about these rankings, though? The fact that Michael managed to balance itself out by ranking #6 on both lists. :)
(Thank you to Ellyn for letting me know about the WaPo articles!)
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