How popular is the baby name Axl 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 Axl.
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In 1988, the names Crue and Tommylee appeared for the very first time in the U.S. baby name data:
Boys named Crue
Boys named Tommylee
1990
.
.
1989
8
5
1988
10*
6*
1987
.
.
1986
.
.
*Debut
Both of these debuts can be attributed to the heavy metal band Mötley Crüe.
The band had more than a dozen songs reach Billboard‘s Hot 100 chart from 1984 to 1992. Their two top-ten hits — “Dr. Feelgood” and “Without You” — peaked in 1989 and 1990, respectively. So…what was drawing attention to the names Crue and Tommylee a year earlier, in 1988?
My guess is the song “Girls, Girls, Girls,” which climbed to #12 in the summer of 1987. More importantly, the song’s then-risqué music video — which depicted the Mötley Crüe’s four members (vocalist Vince Neil, guitarist Mick Mars, bassist Nikki Sixx, and drummer Tommy Lee) carousing at a strip club and riding their motorcycles around Los Angeles — was played frequently on MTV.
How did the band come to be called “Mötley Crüe”? Here’s how Vince Neil told the story:
Mick goes, “How about Motley Crew?” and we go, “That’s cool.” I guess somebody had come into a room that Mick was in and said, “Isn’t this a motley-looking crew?” when he was in another band. And we were drinkin’ Löwenbräu at the time and wanted to feel like we were worldly, so we put the umlauts over the letters and misspelled the name Crüe to make it look more European.
(I don’t know if any of the babies named Crue also got the röck döts.)
The particular focus on the name of the band’s drummer (as opposed to its frontman, à la Axl) is likely attributable to Tommy Lee’s second claim to fame: Husband of Heather Locklear. He’d married the actress, who played Sammy Jo Dean on the ’80s prime time soap opera Dynasty, in May of 1986.
Which name do you like more, Crue or Tommylee?
P.S. Mick Mars’ first child, a son born in 1971, was named Les Paul after pioneering guitarist/luthier Les Paul (born Lester William Polsfuss in Wisconsin in 1915).
If you’re on the hunt for baby names with a numerological value of 1, you’re in luck! Because today’s post features hundreds of 1-names.
Before we get to the names, though — how do we know that they’re “ones” in numerology?
Turning names into numbers
Here’s how to calculate the numerological value of a name.
First, for each letter, come up with a number to represent that letter’s position in the alphabet. (Letter A would be number 1, letter B would be number 2, and so forth.) Then, add all the numbers together. If the sum has two or more digits, add the digits together recursively until the result is a single digit. That single digit is the name’s numerological value.
For instance, the letters in the name Taylor correspond to the numbers 20, 1, 25, 12, 15, and 18. The sum of these numbers is 91. The digits of 91 added together equal 10, and the digits of 10 added together equal 1 — the numerological value of Taylor.
Baby names with a value of 1
Below you’ll find the most popular 1-names per gender, according to the latest U.S. baby name data. I’ve further sub-categorized them by total sums — just in case any of those larger numbers are significant to anyone.
1 via 10
The letters in the following baby names add up to 10, which reduces to one (1+0=1).
Girl names (1 via 10)
Boy name (1 via 10)
Eda, Dea, Ebba, Adda, Ade
Ade
1 via 19
The letters in the following baby names add up to 19, which reduces to one (1+9=10; 1+0=1).
Girl names (1 via 19)
Boy names (1 via 19)
Mae, Ema, Abbie, Alea, Aela
Adam, Jace, Dan, Jed, Jah
1 via 28
The letters in the following baby names add up to 28, which reduces to one (2+8=10; 1+0=1).
There’s no definitive answer, unfortunately, because various numerological systems exist, and each one has its own interpretation of the number one. That said, if we look at a couple of modern numerology/astrology websites, we see 1 being described as “leader,” “independent,” “determined,” “creative,” and “self-assured.”
We can also look at associations, which are a bit more concrete. Here are a few things that are associated with the number 1:
Unity
Uniqueness
First place (as in sports)
Unicorn
Monolith
I kept the list short because you can associate the number 1 with just about anything. It’s universal, you might say. (See what I did there?)
What does the number 1 mean to you? What are your strongest associations with the number?
P.S. To see names with other numerological values, check out the posts for the numbers two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine.
We’re well into November, and while I don’t typically experience “November Rain” — usually just November snow — now’s a good time to talk about Axl, the name of the guy who sang “November Rain.”
Axl debuted in the U.S. baby name data in 1988:
1990: 25 baby boys named Axl
1989: 21 baby boys named Axl
1988: 9 baby boys named Axl [debut]
1987: unlisted
1986: unlisted
The next year, the names Axle and Aksel both debuted, while the already-in-use name Axel (which can be traced back to the biblical name Absalom) more than doubled in usage.
The influence? Axl Rose, lead singer of the rock band Guns N’ Roses.
The band’s debut album Appetite for Destruction was released in July of 1987. It became a commercial success the next year, after the band started touring and releasing singles such as “Sweet Child o’ Mine” (peaked at #1 in Sept. 1988), “Welcome to the Jungle” (#7 in Dec. ’88), and “Paradise City” (#5 in Mar. ’89).
Axl Rose grew up in Lafayette, Indiana, with the name William “Bill” Bailey. As a teen, he discovered that his surname at birth had been Rose, so he started using it. Not long after that, he adopted the first name Axl:
One of the short-lived local bands he’d sung with was called AXL, which then became his moniker. When the band broke up, he kept using the name, and styled himself “W. Axl Rose.”
And in early 1986, right before signing with Geffen Records, he legally changed his name to “W. Axl Rose.”
W. Axl Rose grave from the “Don’t Cry” music video (1991)
Unexpectedly, the name is more popular today than ever before:
2017: 335 baby boys named Axl [rank: 716th]
2016: 305 baby boys named Axl [rank: 778th]
2015: 313 baby boys named Axl [rank: 760th]
2014: 266 baby boys named Axl [rank: 842nd]
2013: 111 baby boys named Axl
2012: 102 baby boys named Axl
This is probably thanks to another singer, Fergie, who welcomed a baby boy in August of 2013 and named him Axl after Axl Rose. (Some ’80s trivia for you: Stacy “Fergie” Ferguson was on Kids Incorporated with Marta “Martika” Marrero.)
What are your thoughts on the baby name Axl? Would you use it?
P.S. How did the band name “Guns N’ Roses” come to be? It was created from the surnames of two of the founding members, Axl Rose and Tracii Guns (born Tracy Richard Irving Ulrich), essentially. More precisely, it came from the merger of the bands they were in at the time: Hollywood Rose and L.A. Guns.
Sources:
Davis, Stephen. Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N’ Roses. New York: Gotham Books, 2008.
So far we’ve talked about three baby names discovered through dreams: Easton, West, and Axl. Today we’ve got another three — two more from celebrities, one from a non-celeb.
Let’s start with the non-celeb: Selena Smith, career development coach at Spartanburg Community College in South Carolina. In an interview published about a month ago, she mentioned that the name of her 12-year-old son named Kyler “came to me in a dream while I was pregnant.”
Next we have actress/WWE wrestler Stacy Keibler, who said the name of her daughter Ava Grace (b. 2014) “came to me in a dream,” without elaborating. When asked about potential baby names a few weeks before the baby was born, Keibler said: “We just talked about one name and that was it–easy peasy. Everything with us has been easy and effortless, including the name.”
Finally there’s Pat Monahan, vocalist for the band Train. He said the name of his son Rock (b. 2012) came from a dream, but the person who had the dream wasn’t one of the parents:
“My sister-in-law was having these very intuitive, very intense dreams that [my unborn son] was visiting her and insisting that his name was Rock,” the singer, 43, tells PEOPLE.
After several episodes of baby boy revealing his name choice, Monahan admits they began to “take it real seriously” — especially when the expectant parents weren’t getting the message.
“She said that my son was coming to her and grabbing her face and saying, ‘Aunt Summer, my mom and dad won’t listen to me in their dreams. You need to tell them my name is Rock,'” he recalls.
“Then she had another one where he was wearing a [Colorado] Rockies uniform playing baseball. He was like, ‘Aunt Summer, look, my name’s on [my shirt].'”
Pat didn’t say how many name-related dreams Summer had in total.
Do you know of any other stories like these? Or, have you ever dreamed a baby name?
(Incidentally, a Kardashian baby born in late 2016 was named Dream, so “Dream” itself may see a boost in usage in 2016 or 2017.)
Update, Mar. 2024: Here’s one more dream-name story! It was posted to Toronto’s (now-defunct) website The Baby File in early 2011 by someone named Steven.
[I]n 2003 we did not know what sex our baby would be but since my side has only produced boys for the last 90 yrs, the odds we good it was going to be a boy. So when it came to names we had the most disagreements [with] boys names. Then the night before the birth my wife had a dream in which a room of white bearded elders had said that “her name will be Elowyn”. We had never heard that name before nor was there anything online about it in 2003. The next day we were surprised with birth of a … girl! So we went with the dream and “Elowyn” came into shine over our world.
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