How popular is the baby name Anne 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 Anne.
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John Tyler became the unexpected 10th president of the United States in 1841, upon the sudden death of William Henry Harrison.
He wasn’t a particularly impressive commander-in-chief, but he was notable for at least one thing: having more legitimate children than any other U.S. president.
He married this first wife, Letitia Christian, in 1813. They had eight children:
Mary (b. 1815)
Robert (b. 1816)
John (b. 1819)
Letitia (b. 1821)
Elizabeth (b. 1823)
Anne Contesse (1825-1825) – John Tyler’s paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Contesse.
Alice (b. 1827)
Tazewell, called “Taz” (b. 1830) – He “was named by the older children after the Tyler family’s close friend, Littleton W. Tazewell.”
Letitia had a stroke in 1839, and died in 1842.
John married his second wife, Julia Gardiner, in 1844. They had seven more children:
David (b. 1846)
John (b. 1848)
Julia (b. 1849)
Lachlan (b. 1851) – Julia’s mother’s maiden name was McLachlan.
Lyon (b. 1853) – Probably named in honor of Julia’s ancestor Lion Gardiner.
Robert Fitzwalter, called “Fitz” (b. 1856) – He was “[n]amed Robert Fitzwalter in honor of Julia Tyler’s ancestor of thirteenth-century England.” (I found several contenders, but my guess is this guy.)
Pearl (b. 1860) – She “was originally to be named Margaret, but she was christened Pearl instead.”
Keepers have named the young male Edward after Johnny Depp’s famous character, Edward Scissorhands, due to his impressive claws – which will grow up to four inches in length and enable him to cling on and climb easily through the tree-top branches of his Rainforest Life home.
I was struck by this, since Murphy and others had first described Athena’s personality to me as “feisty.” “They earn their names,” Murphy had told me. Athena is named for the Greek goddess of wisdom, war, and strategy. She is not usually a laid-back octopus, like George had been. “Athena could pull you into the tank,” Murphy had warned. “She’s curious about what you are.”
The most famous of all the Mercury chimps, due to his landmark January 1961 flight, Ham was actually not publicly called Ham until after the flight succeeded. The name by which he’s now known — an acronym for Holloman Aerospace Medical Center at the Air Force base — was only widely used when he returned safely to earth; NASA reportedly wanted to avoid bad publicity should a named (and thus a known, publicly embraced) animal be killed; all the Mercury chimps were known by numbers.
Republican Gov. Paul LePage, the state’s all-time veto champion, has named his new dog Veto.
LePage, who has earned renown for exercising his veto pen on bills he didn’t like, adopted a Jack Russell terrier mix from a shelter.
[…]
LePage chose the name Veto because his pet “is the mascot of good public policy, defender of the Maine people and protector of hardworking taxpayers from bad legislation,” his spokesman Peter Steele said.
Steele joked that the governor is going to train the dog to deliver vetoes from his office to legislative leaders.
Fans of the K-pop group NCT 127 donated money in January to name a baby pudu at the Los Angeles Zoo after one of its members, Haechan (HECH’-ehn). This week, the human Haechan got to meet his namesake, snapping selfies with the little deer at his enclosure.
Long, long ago — five years, to be precise — Jeff Owens accepted that his calls to the vet would tax his fortitude. When the person on the other end asks his name, Owens, a test scorer in Albuquerque, says, “Jeff.” When they ask for his cat’s name, he has to tell them, “Baby Jeff.” The black exotic shorthair, a wheezy female with a squashed face and soulful orange eyes, is named for Owens, says his partner, Brittany Means, whose tweet about Jeff and Baby Jeff went viral this past spring. The whole thing started as a joke several years ago, when Means started calling every newcomer to their home — the car, the couch — “Baby Jeff.” Faced with blank adoption paperwork in 2017, the couple realized that only one name would do.
Hearst put the bear on display [in 1889] in Golden Gate Park and named him Monarch. At more than 1,200 pounds, Monarch was the largest bear ever held captive.
[…]
Taking a cue from the Sonoma revolt in 1846 [after which a flag featuring a bear was created to represent the captured region], the state again decided to make the California Grizzly the flag’s focal point. Only this time they wanted a bear that actually looked like a bear.
Illustrators used the recently deceased Monarch as the model for the bear on our state flag.
(Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst took the name “Monarch” from the tagline of the San Francisco Examiner, the “Monarch of the Dailies.”)
About Pigcasso, a 450-pound painting pig in South Africa with a great name:
She’s fat, friendly and fabulous! Meet Pigcasso – the fine swine who was rescued from the brink of extinction at a South African pig ‘farm’. From pork chop to hog heaven, she loves the sweet things in life: Eat. Sleep. Eat. Repeat. She also loves to paint – and that’s no hogwash! Pigcasso’s primary purpose? To paint a better picture for farm animals.
(Titles of Pigcasso’s paintings include Grin, Vitality, Rockstar, and Brexit.)
From the description of a mid-2020 video released by the Australian Reptile Park of New South Wales:
We have a very special announcement… Our very first koala of the season has popped out of Mums pouch to say hello!
Keepers have decided to name her Ash! Ash is the first koala born at the park since the tragic Australian bushfires and is a sign of hope for the future of Australia’s native wildlife.
New Orleans dogs are often the namesakes of the cuisine (Gumbo, Roux, Beignet, Po-Boy, Boudin); the Saints (Brees, Payton, Deuce); music (Toussaint, Jazz, Satchmo); streets (Clio, Tchoupitoulas, Calliope); neighborhoods (Pearl, Touro, Gert) and Mardi Gras krewes (Zulu, Rex, Bacchus).
One cast member had very few complaints about shooting in Hawaii, never letting it get in the way of her own agenda on the set. The filmmakers found Bertha, the water buffalo that [Jack] Black’s character rides, in Texas and flew her to Kauai on a special plane. But about midway through filming, everyone was in for a big surprise. One day the trainer called us and said, Oh, by the way, Bertha can’t work because when we showed up at the corral this morning, she had a calf, recalls producer McLeod. We didn’t know she was pregnant. No one knew she was pregnant. Bertha having this baby was definitely kind of a humorous morale booster for everyone. In honor of Jack Black, the animal trainer named Bertha’s baby Little Jack.
Bears at Brooks River are assigned numbers for monitoring, management, and identification purposes. Inevitably, some bears acquire nicknames from staff and these nicknames are included in this book, but naming wild animals is not without controversy. Is it appropriate to name wild animals?
[…]
Names also carry meaning, intentionally or not. What stigmas would you attach to a young bear nicknamed Fluffy versus a large male bear named Killer? How would those stigmas alter your experience when watching that animal?
(The booklet also included the nicknames of various Katmai brown bears. For example, “Walker” had “large dark eye rings” reminiscent of zombie eyes, and “Evander” was missing part of an ear — much like Evander Holyfield after his 1997 fight with Mike Tyson.)
In England we find dogs that were named Sturdy, Whitefoot, Hardy, Jakke, Bo and Terri. Anne Boleyn, one of the wives of King Henry VIII, had a dog named Purkoy, who got its name from the French ‘pourquoi’ because it was very inquisitive.
Clara is my 2-year-old Wheaten terrier and one of several dogs in my neighborhood with a name that sounds as if it came from a shuffleboard tournament on a golden-years cruise. Among her pals, Fern is red-nose pit bull, Alfie is (mostly) a black lab and Eleanor is a mix of Bernese mountain dog and poodle.
This pack has led me to conclude that whereas we look back to remote centuries when giving children trendy names like Emma, Sebastian, Julian or Charlotte, we name our dogs after our grandparents.
[…]
This means that future generations of dogs should be prepared to be called the mom-and-dad names of today. Names like Kimberly, Jason and Heather.
From a 2019 video of Vogue editor Anna Wintour talking about her new puppy, named Finch:
She’s called Finch because we call all of our dogs after characters in To Kill a Mockingbird. So we have had a Scout, a Radley, and a Harper. And let me tell you, they are not happy about Finch’s arrival.
From a video in which rapper DRAM talks about his goldendoodle named Idnit [vid]:
The generic name “Pol” for a parrot can be traced back to England since at least the early 1600s. In his 1606 comedy Volpone, Renaissance playwright — and close friend of William Shakespeare — Ben Jonson assigned many of the characters animal personas which reflected their true nature.
[…]
Two comic relief-type characters, Sir Politic Would-Be (“Sir Pol” for short) and his wife, are visitors from England who are trying to ingratiate themselves into Venetian society, and they do so by simply mimicking the words and behavior of Volpone and his associates. Because of their endearing ignorance of what they are actually saying when they repeat phrases they’ve learned, Jonson describes them as parrots.
It is unclear whether Jonson actually coined the term “Pol” as a catch-all moniker for parrots, or if he simply popularized it. In any case, indulgent British pet owners eventually turned “Pol” into the much cutesier diminutive “Polly,” and both names made their way across the Atlantic.
Staff at the Buckinghamshire, England [animal] hospital say the gull somehow got curry or turmeric all over his feathers, which prevented him from flying properly. The bird, named Vinny after the popular Indian dish Vindaloo curry, put up a fight but eventually let the staff scrub his feathers.
From a late 2020 Zoological Society of London news release:
ZSL Whipsnade Zoo’s giraffe herd welcomed a giant six-foot-tall new arrival this week — on what has been dubbed ‘the day of hope’ by staff at the UK’s largest zoo.
The female calf was born at the same time [that] the first COVID-19 vaccine was given to 90-year-old Margaret Keenan, during the early hours of Tuesday 8 December — and in recognition of the poignant moment, the infant has been named Margaret.
From a late 2023 BBC article about a rescued turtle:
The tiny turtle was found in a pretty bad condition off the Scottish island of Iona – which she was named after – in January 2022.
Her rescuers weren’t sure if she was going to make it at first, as she is a loggerhead turtle, a tropical species that needs warm temperatures to survive.
But after almost two years of recovery in the UK and Portugal, Iona has now been released back into the ocean by marine scientists.
Back in 1926, the name Narice popped up in the U.S. baby name data with an impressive 13 baby girls. Right after that, it dropped out of the data — and it’s been out of the data ever since, making it a one-hit wonder. (It was the top one-hit wonder of the year, in fact.)
1928: unlisted
1927: unlisted
1926: 13 baby girls named Narice [debut]
1925: unlisted
1924: unlisted
What put the name in the data in the first place?
A short story called The Dice of God. It was serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine (back when Cosmo focused on fiction) starting in February of 1926, and appears to have been expanded and published as a standalone book the same year.
The tale was written by South African romance novelist Cynthia Stockley (1863-1936), who was popular in various English-speaking countries during the early 20th century. Several of her books were even turned into American silent films.
The story was set “amidst the lush and dangerous scenery of the Victoria Falls in Rhodesia,” and its two main characters were women named Anne Havilland and Narice Vanne — an author and an illustrator working on a travel book together. Here’s more from the synopsis on dust jacket:
When Sir Anthony Tulloch, better known to his fellows as “Bad Luck,” looked upon the girlish beauty of Narice Vanne, his fate was clear to him; but he had not reckoned with Anne Havilland, who was also beautiful,–in a very different way.
The word Sway popped up for the first time in the U.S. baby name data in 2001:
2003: 14 baby girls and 5 baby boys named Sway
2002: 12 baby girls named Sway
2001: 8 baby girls named Sway [debut]
2000: unlisted
1999: unlisted
For a long time I assumed the main influence was MTV personality Sway Calloway. But, while I still think Sway had an influence on male usage, I’ve since discovered a much better explanation for the 2001 debut as a female name.
One of the main characters in the 2000 car heist film Gone in 60 Seconds was mechanic-slash-bartender Sara “Sway” Wayland (played by Angelina Jolie). She was the love interest of protagonist Randall “Memphis” Raines (played by Nicolas Cage), who was tasked with stealing 50 specific, expensive cars inside of 72 hours.
The film didn’t get great reviews, but I do remember appreciating the fact that each of the 50 cars was assigned a feminine code-name:
So, how do you feel about the name Sway? If you were having a baby girl, would you be more likely to name her something modern, like Sway, or something traditional, like Sara or Susan?
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