How popular is the baby name Dolores 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 Dolores.
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Over at The Public Domain Review, I found a collection of 51 novelty playing cards — several incomplete decks, mixed together — from 1916 that feature the images and names of popular movie actresses from that era.
Below are all the first names from those cards, plus where those names happened to rank in the 1916 baby name data. (Two-thirds of them were in the top 100, and over 95% fell inside the top 1,000.)
The baby name Ryder became trendy in the early 21st century, thanks in large part to actress Kate Hudson naming her son Ryder in early 2004.
But Ryder wasn’t new to the data at that point. It first showed up in the early 1960s:
1964: unlisted
1963: 7 baby boys named Ryder
1962: unlisted
1961: unlisted
1960: 6 baby boys named Ryder [debut]
1959: unlisted
The source? Looks to be Where the Boys Are, which was actually three things: a bestselling novel published in early 1960, a successful movie released in late 1960, and the movie’s title track, which peaked at #4 on Billboard‘s Hot 100 chart in early 1961.
The book focused on a group of four co-eds — Merritt, Tuggle, Melanie, and Angie — from a Midwestern college. For spring break, they decided to escape winter and head to the sunny beaches of Ft. Lauderdale. Because that’s where the boys were, of course. And the “boy” that main character Merritt eventually fell for was an Ivy Leaguer named Ryder Smith.
The book was a comedy, but also included realistic depictions of the behaviors and attitudes of teenagers in the early ’60s. The Saturday Review called it “[b]oth good comedy and first-rate social anthropology.”
The author, Glendon Swarthout, was an English professor at Michigan State University. In the late 1950s, when he was in his early 40s, he learned about the tradition of going to Fort Lauderdale for spring break (which had begun with collegiate swimmers in the 1930s). He tagged along with his students one year, and soon after wrote a book inspired by the experience.
The movie Where the Boys Are, which was a watered-down version of the book, was out by late December. It featured a cast of relatively unknown actors. The most famous face in the film was that of singer Connie Francis, who played Angie (and also sang the title track).
Merritt was played by Dolores Hart, and the character clearly had an influence on the usage of Merritt as a girl name:
1963: 12 baby girls named Merritt
1962: 13 baby girls named Merritt
1961: 17 baby girls named Merritt
1960: unlisted
1959: unlisted
Merritt’s love interest, Ryder, was played by “a young, preternaturally tan George Hamilton.” Her friend Melanie was played by Yvette Mimieux, who’d appeared on the big screen as Weena earlier the same year.
Thanks to the book and (especially) the movie, spring break grew from a minor phenomenon into the “cultural rite of passage” that it is today. The number of American college students flooding into Fort Lauderdale every spring swelled from about 15,000 before the book came out to about 370,000 by the mid-1980s.
The trendiness of Fort Lauderdale as a spring break destination peaked in the ’80s, but the trendiness of Ryder (as a boy name) didn’t peak until the mid-2010s:
2018: 3,000 baby boys named Ryder [rank: 131st]
2017: 3256 baby boys named Ryder [rank: 122nd]
2016: 3,883 baby boys named Ryder [rank: 102nd]
2015: 4,154 baby boys named Ryder [rank: 98th]
2014: 4,103 baby boys named Ryder [rank: 95th]
2013: 3,785 baby boys named Ryder [rank: 103rd]
2012: 3,814 baby boys named Ryder [rank: 100th]
2011: 3,706 baby boys named Ryder [rank: 108th]
What are your thoughts on the name Ryder? Would you use it?
The Dolores-like baby name Dellora appeared in the U.S. data for a total of six years, seeing peak usage in 1922:
1925: unlisted
1924: 8 baby girls named Dellora
1923: 13 baby girls named Dellora
1922: 14 baby girls named Dellora
1921: 7 baby girls named Dellora
1920: unlisted
1919: 7 baby girls named Dellora
1918: 5 baby girls named Dellora
1917: unlisted
Much of this usage is attributable to heiress Dellora Angell of St. Charles, Illinois.
Her name first started popping up in the newspapers in late 1918, upon the death of her maternal aunt, Dellora Gates. Aunt Dellora was the widow of wealthy industrialist John W. Gates, and she left the bulk of the Gates fortune to her last two close relatives: her brother Edward, and her teenage niece/namesake Dellora (the daughter of her deceased sister Lavern).
In the early 1920s, the newspapers began linking young Dellora to various suitors (e.g., a Brazilian physician named Vantini, an oil man named Campbell).
In late 1922, she finally got engaged to a childhood friend from St. Charles named Lester Norris, described as a “poor artist and son of the village undertaker.” (He was a newspaper cartoonist; he later became a businessman.)
They had a small wedding in March of 1923. After that, they rented a modest apartment in St. Charles, where Dellora “began housekeeping, doing her own cooking and sewing, and having a lot of fun doing it.”
For several years the newspapers continued to report on Dellora’s growing family, and her unusual decision to live so simply:
The richest young woman in the world, who, from the number of her millions, and her youth and beauty, one would expect to find wintering at Cannes, moving with the seasons from one smart watering place to another and filling her wardrobe with Parisian gowns and jewels, lives quietly in a Middle Western town, wears gingham dresses, as she does own housework, and looks after her two babies herself.
(They went on to have a total of five children: Lavern, Lester*, Joann, Robert, and John.)
In the meanwhile, Dellora and Lester (and Dellora’s uncle, Edward) quietly gave back to the community of St. Charles. They funded/created a theater, a municipal center, a hospital (named “Delnor,” a contraction of Dellora Norris), a hotel, a community center, and made numerous other contributions and donations to schools, churches, and so forth. Today, Dellora’s name lives on in the name of the Dellora A. Norris Cultural Arts Center.
What are your thoughts on baby name Dellora? Would you consider using it on a modern baby?
Sources:
“J. W. Gates’s Widow Dies at Age of 63.” New York Tribune 29 Nov. 1918: 12.
“The Gates Heiress and Her “Love-In-a-Cottage”.” Ogden Standard Examiner 26 Jul. 1925: 22.
Szymczak, Patricia M. “The Legacy.” Chicago Tribune 15 Jan. 1989.
*In July of 1925, it was reported that baby Lester, born in April, was still nameless and “in lieu of a permanent name” was being called Skeezix after the comic strip character (see Clovia).
If you’re on the hunt for baby names with a numerological value of 7, you’re in luck! Because today’s post features hundreds of 7-names.
Before we get to the names, though — how do we know that they’re “sevens” 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 Victoria correspond to the numbers 22, 9, 3, 20, 15, 18, 9, and 1. The sum of these numbers is 97. The digits of 97 added together equal 16, and the digits of 16 added together equal 7 — the numerological value of Victoria.
Baby names with a value of 7
Below you’ll find the most popular 7-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.
7 via 16
The letters in the following baby names add up to 16, which reduces to seven (1+6=7).
Girl names (7 via 16)
Boy names (7 via 16)
Ana, Jada, Alba, Adaia, Fia
Cal, Chad, Jae, Dak, Efe
7 via 25
The letters in the following baby names add up to 25, which reduces to seven (2+5=7).
There’s no definitive answer, unfortunately, because various numerological systems exist, and each one has its own interpretation of the number seven. That said, if we look at a couple of modern numerology/astrology websites, we see 7 being described as “truth-seeking,” “introspective,” “intellectual,” “reserved,” and “unusual.”
We can also look at associations, which are a bit more concrete. Here are some things that are associated with the number 7:
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