The baby name Ashanti shot to peak usage — and nearly into the girls’ top 100 — in the year 2002:
| Girls named Ashanti [rank] | Boys named Ashanti | |
| 2004 | 532 [533rd] | 10 |
| 2003 | 962 [325th] | 6 |
| 2002 | 2,945* [115th] | 23 |
| 2001 | 281 [825th] | 24 |
| 2000 | 206 | 20 |
Here’s a visual:
Many Ashanti-like names also saw higher usage in 2002. Examples include Ashanty, Ashante, Ashaunti, Ashantee, Ashonti, Ashawnti, Ashonte, Ashantie, Kashanti, Tashanti, and Lashanti (the fastest-rising girl name of 2002) — not to mention debut names such as Jashanti, Dashanti, Eshanti, Ashauntee, and Ashantii.
What was drawing so much attention to the name Ashanti in the early 2000s?
Mononymous R&B singer Ashanti (pronounced uh-SHAHN-tee), born Ashanti Douglas in New York in 1980.
Ashanti kicked off her career with a string of hits.
In early 2002, she was the featured artist on two songs — “Always On Time” by Ja Rule and “What’s Luv?” by Fat Joe — that peaked at #1 and #2 (respectively) on Billboard‘s Hot 100 chart. After that, her first solo single, “Foolish,” reached the top spot and stayed there for ten weeks straight (from April to June).
Here’s the audio for “Foolish”:
The following year, Ashanti reached the #2 spot twice more — first as the featured artist on “Mesmerize” (again by Ja Rule), and second with her solo single “Rock Wit U (Awww Baby).”
Here’s what Ashanti told Jet magazine in 2002 about her name:
She said the name Ashanti originates in the African country of Ghana. “It is a tribe and what’s cool about it is that in a lot of countries women are low on the totem pole. But in the Ashanti tribe women are respected.”
The word Ashanti is a form of the word Asante, which refers to the Asante people of Ghana. The etymology of Asante isn’t known for certain — one theory links it to a Twi word meaning “war,” another to a Twi word meaning “clay.”
In mid-2022, the singer turned her experience of growing up with an unusual name into a children’s book called My Name Is a Story.
The story opens with a brown girl named Ashanti in a racially diverse classroom; she wishes that her name was “easy…like recess, sunshine, and skipping rocks.” Instead, she finds that her name is “a spelling bee for my teacher and jumbled puzzle pieces on my classmates’ tongues.”
Ultimately, the little girl “learns to love her unique name.”
What are your thoughts on the baby name Ashanti?
P.S. The name first entered the girls’ top 1,000 in 1979 thanks to the movie Ashanti (1979) starring Michael Caine and Beverly Johnson.
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