How popular is the baby name Don 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 Don.

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Popularity of the baby name Don


Posts that mention the name Don

Triplets named for Dodgers pitchers

On October 6, 1963, the Los Angeles Dodgers won the fourth and final game of the 1963 World Series against the New York Yankees. They swept the series with the help of their pitchers — Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Johnny Podres, and reliever Ron Perranoski — who collectively gave up only four runs in all four games combined.

The same day, Mr. and Mrs. Eddie A. Turner of Compton, California, welcomed triplets — two boys and one girl. Several days later, they announced that they’d named the babies after Dodgers pitchers:

  • Donald Scott – for Donald Scott “Don” Drysdale
  • Ronald Peter – for Ronald Peter “Ron” Perranoski
  • Sandy (the girl) – for Sanford “Sandy” Koufax

Sources:

Where did the baby name Lacosta come from in 1974?

La Costa's album "With All My Love" (1975).
La Costa album

The interesting name Lacosta first appeared in the U.S. baby name data in 1974, and it reached peak usage several years later in 1977:

1978: 17 baby girls named Lacosta
1977: 40 baby girls named Lacosta [peak]
1976: 33 baby girls named Lacosta
1975: 27 baby girls named Lacosta
1974: 6 baby girls named Lacosta [debut]
1973: unlisted

Where did it come from?

Country singer LaCosta Tucker — older sister of Tanya Tucker. LaCosta recorded under the name “La Costa” from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s.

LaCosta’s parents, “oilfield nomads” Beau and Juanita, moved the family around the South while the children were growing up in the 1950s and ’60s.

Their first kid they very conventionally called Don, but after that they named them exotically, to relieve the drab hardness of their existence. They called their first girl LaCosta. “In Spanish, it means ‘the coast’,” she says.

“When we were living In Seminole, Texas, where I was born, our parents had a real good friend who lived In Denver City, about 15 miles away. Her name was LaCosta Ivey, and they named me after her because they liked her and they were looking for a name that was different.”

In 1999 — more than two decades after “Lacosta” debuted in the data — Tanya herself used it as a middle name for her third child, daughter Layla LaCosta Laseter.

What are your thoughts on the baby name Lacosta?

Source: “LaCosta, Tanya Tucker’s Big Sister, Gets A Break, Too.” Cincinnati Enquirer 25 Jun. 1974: 34.

P.S. Natalie Cole included a song called “La Costa” on her 1977 album Thankful. But the song wasn’t a single, and the album was released late in the year (November), so I doubt the song had much influence on baby names.

Don the Beachcomber

The tiki craze of the mid-20th century that I mentioned in yesterday’s post was single-handedly kicked off by Ernest Raymond Beaumont-Gantt, a.k.a., Donn Beach.

Ernest was a bootlegger as a young man in the 1920s. After Prohibition ended in 1933, he opened a bar/restaurant in Hollywood called Don’s Beachcomber. The establishment became very successful, introducing not just a slew of tiki drinks (e.g., the zombie) but also several food items (e.g., the pu pu platter). So Ernest started referring to himself as “Don the Beachcomber.” Eventually, he not only altered the name of the bar (“Don the Beachcomber”), but also legally renamed himself (“Donn Beach“).

Sources: The Bizarre Rise and Fall of the Tiki Bar, Donn Beach – Wikipedia

Where did the baby name Dokken come from in 1989?

The Dokken album "Beast from the East" (1988).
Dokken album

The unusual baby name Dokken debuted in 1989 and never came back, making it a one-hit wonder in the U.S. baby name data.

  • 1991: unlisted
  • 1990: unlisted
  • 1989: 5 baby boys named Dokken [debut]
  • 1988: unlisted
  • 1987: unlisted

Where did it come from?

My guess is the ’80s rock band Dokken, which “was a fixture on MTV in the eighties and enjoyed a string of best-selling albums through the decade.”

The band formed in 1979 and became a commercial success in the mid-1980s. The Dokken song “Dream Warriors” was featured in the slasher movie A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987).

In 1989, Dokken scored its first and only Grammy nomination (in the brand new “Best Metal Performance” category) with the live album Beast from the East. But — along with Faith No More, Queensrÿche, and Soundgarden — they ended up losing to Metallica.

The band was named after vocalist Don Dokken, whose Norwegian surname can be traced back to an Old Norse geographical word meaning “hollow, depression.”

…And now it’s time for the question of the day! The Dokken-like, cologne-inspired baby name Drakkar popped up in the data just a few years before Dokken did. Which late ’80s name do you prefer, Dokken or Drakkar?

Sources:

  • Dokken – Wikipedia
  • Hanks, Patrick. (Ed.) Dictionary of American Family Names. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
  • Phillips, William and Brian Cogan. Encyclopedia of Heavy Metal Music. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009.