How popular is the baby name Cheryl 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 Cheryl.

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Popularity of the baby name Cheryl


Posts that mention the name Cheryl

Where did the baby name Cherrill come from in 1931?

Actress Virginia Cherrill in the movie "City Lights" (1931)
Virginia Cherrill in “City Lights“

I had to follow yesterday’s post about Nydia with a post about Cherrill. Why? Because both names were inspired by fictional blind girls selling flowers. How random is that?

While Nydia came from a 19th-century book, Cherrill comes from a 20th-century film. But not just any film — one of the best romantic comedies of all time, according to those in the know.

The baby name Cherrill popped up in the SSA’s baby name data for the very first time in 1931. (This was more than a decade before the similar-sounding name Cheryl started becoming popular.)

  • 1933: 8 baby girls named Cherrill
  • 1932: 6 baby girls named Cherrill
  • 1931: 9 baby girls named Cherrill [debut]
  • 1930: unlisted
  • 1929: unlisted

The reason? Charlie Chaplin’s silent film City Lights, which was released in early 1931 and featured Hollywood newcomer Virginia Cherrill as a blind flower-seller (the romantic interest of Chaplin’s famous “Little Tramp” character).

Actors Charlie Chaplin and Virginia Cherrill in the movie "City Lights" (1931)
Scene from “City Lights“

Chaplin had auditioned many young actresses before he noticed twenty-year-old Virginia Cherrill when they both sat ringside at a boxing match at the Hollywood Legion Stadium. Although a beautiful blonde, it was the manner in which she coped with her near-sightedness that earned her the role.

Despite the fact that talkies had largely replaced silent films by 1931, City Lights did extremely well at the box office.

And the film has stood the test of time. In 1991, the Library of Congress inducted City Lights into the National Film Registry. In 2008, the American Film Institute ranked City Lights the #1 romantic comedy of all time.

Virginia Cherrill, who was born in Illinois in 1908, never aspired to be a film star. (She was only visiting California when she was spotted by Chaplin.) She appeared in several more films after City Lights, but stopped acting after marrying actor Cary Grant in 1934. (They divorced the next year. Grant went on to marry Barbara Hutton and become a father figure to Barbara’s son Lance.)

What do you think of the baby name Cherrill?

Sources:

Images: Screenshots of City Lights

Interesting baby name analysis

I only recently noticed that Behind the Name, one of my favorite websites for baby name definitions, has a page called United States Popularity Analysis — a “computer-created analysis of the United States top 1000 names for the period 1880 to 2012.”

The page has some interesting top ten lists. Here are three of them:

Most Volatile

Boy NamesGirl Names
1. Elvis
2. Brooks
3. Santiago
4. Lincoln
5. Ernie
6. Wyatt
7. Quincy
8. Rogers
9. Alec
10. Dexter		1. Juliet
2. Lea
3. Justine
4. Martina
5. Felicia
6. Delilah
7. Selina
8. Lonnie
9. Magdalena
10. Katy

Biggest Recoveries

Boy NamesGirl Names
1. Silas
2. Isaiah
3. Caleb
4. Emmett
5. Jordan
6. Josiah
7. Harrison
8. Ezra
9. Jason
10. Jesus		1. Ella
2. Stella
3. Sadie
4. Sophie
5. Isabella
6. Lily
7. Hannah
8. Isabelle
9. Sophia
10. Lilly

Biggest Flash-in-the-Pans

Boy NamesGirl Names
1. Dewey
2. Woodrow
3. Dale
4. Barry
5. Rick
6. Greg
7. Roosevelt
8. Shannon
9. Kim
10. Darrin		1. Debra
2. Lori
3. Tammy
4. Pamela
5. Tracy
6. Cheryl
7. Beverly
8. Dawn
9. Diane
10. Kathy

I wonder what the formulas were. I’d love to try the same analysis on the SSA’s full list, using raw numbers instead of rankings. Wonder how much overlap there’d be…

The story behind Cheryl Strayed’s surname

From the cover of the book "Wild" (2012) by Cheryl Strayed

Earlier this year, the New York Times published an article about women who created new surnames for themselves after divorce.

Hanging on to your ex’s last name can daily conjure an unhappy past, while going back to a maiden name you’ve outgrown can be difficult to imagine. Divorce can be an opportunity to create an entirely different surname that speaks to the woman you have become.

The article mentioned several women, including writer Cheryl Strayed, who has written in-depth about her surname-choosing experience.

Cheryl, who was “Sugar” of the popular Dear Sugar advice column, got divorced in her mid-20s. She talks about coming up with the surname “Strayed” in chapter 6 of her memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (which I’m in the middle of reading right now):

Cheryl Strayed, Cheryl Strayed, Cheryl Strayed–those two words together still rolled somewhat hesitantly off my tongue. Cheryl had been my name forever, but Strayed was a new addition–only officially my name since April, when Paul and I had filed for divorce.

[…]

[I]n the months that Paul and I hung in marital limbo, unsure of which direct we’d move in, I pondered the question of my last name, mentally scanning words that sounded good with Cheryl and making lists of characters from novels I admired. Nothing fit until one day when the word strayed came into my mind. Immediately, I looked it up in the dictionary and knew it was mine. Its layered definitions spoke directly to my life and also struck a poetic chord: to wander from the proper path, to deviate from the direct course, to be lost, to become wild, to be without a mother or father, to be without a home, to move about aimlessly in search of something, to diverge or digress.

[…]

Cheryl Strayed I wrote down repeatedly down a whole page of my journal, like a girl with a crush on a boy she hopes to marry. Only the boy didn’t exist. I was my own boy, planting a root in the center of my rootlessness. Still, I had my doubts. To pick a word out of the dictionary and proclaim it mine felt a bit fraudulent to me, a bit childish or foolish, not to mention a touch hypocritical. For years I’d privately mocked the peers in my hippy, artsy, lefty circles who’d taken on names they’d invented for themselves. Jennifers and Michelles who became Sequoias and Lunas; Mikes and Jasons who became Oaks and Thistles. I pressed on anyway, confiding in a few friends about my decision, asking them to begin calling me by my new name to help me test it out. I took a road trip and each time I happened across a guest book I signed it Cheryl Strayed, my hand trembling slightly, feeling vaguely guilty, as if I were forging a check.

By the time Paul and I decided to file our divorce papers, I’d broken in my new name enough that I wrote it without hesitation on the blank line.

P.S. Cheryl’s son Carver was named after short story writer Raymond Carver.

Source: Wood, Megan L. “When the New You Carries a Fresh Identity, Too.” New York Times 15 Feb. 2013. (h/t A Mitchell)

Image: Adapted from the cover of Wild

Baby born on D-Day, named D-Day

D-Day

I couple of years ago I posted about a baby who was born on D-Day — the day, during WWII, that Allied forces invaded northern France via the beaches of Normandy. She was named Dee Day.

Today marks the 69th anniversary of D-Day, so let’s check out another D-Day baby: Earl D-Day Samuel Campbell, who was born in Gallatin, Montana, on June 6, 1944.

Not only that, but he got married on the same date exactly 20 years later — June 6, 1964. (His wife’s name was Cheryl.)

Interesting fact: The “D” in D-Day may simply (and redundantly!) stand for “day,” according to PBS:

The Army began using the codes “H-hour” and “D-day” during World War I to indicate the time or date of an operation’s start. Military planners would write of events planned to occur on “H-hour” or “D-day” — long before the actual dates and times of the operations would be known, or in order to keep plans secret. And so the “D” may simply refer to the “day” of invasion.

Sources:

Image: Normandy Invasion (public domain)