How popular is the baby name Estelle 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 Estelle.
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Last week I posted about the usage of the name Estelle in Sweden, and one of the sources I used for that post mentioned the intriguing case of Engla.
In the early 2000s, the name Engla was on the upswing in Sweden.
Then tragedy struck: a 10-year-old named Engla Juncosa Höglund was abducted in April of 2008. Days later, she was found brutally murdered. Controversially, Engla’s funeral was broadcast live on national TV in Sweden in May. The murderer was apprehended and his trial went on for months.
What happened to the baby name Engla as a result? In the U.S., I would have expected to see a continued rise in usage, thanks solely to the extra exposure. But in Sweden, the opposite occurred:
2017: 20 baby girls named Engla in Sweden
2016: 17 baby girls named Engla in Sweden
2015: 29 baby girls named Engla in Sweden
2014: 16 baby girls named Engla in Sweden
2013: 26 baby girls named Engla in Sweden
2012: 37 baby girls named Engla in Sweden
2011: 51 baby girls named Engla in Sweden
2010: 40 baby girls named Engla in Sweden
2009: 44 baby girls named Engla in Sweden
2008: 169 baby girls named Engla in Sweden
2007: 224 baby girls named Engla in Sweden
2006: 209 baby girls named Engla in Sweden
2005: 147 baby girls named Engla in Sweden
2004: 105 baby girls named Engla in Sweden
2003: 94 baby girls named Engla in Sweden
2002: 75 baby girls named Engla in Sweden
2001: 56 baby girls named Engla in Sweden
2000: 30 baby girls named Engla in Sweden
1999: 16 baby girls named Engla in Sweden
1998: 11 baby girls named Engla in Sweden
Even more surprisingly (to me), the name never recovered.
Within a span of 20 years, the name went from being unpopular, to ranking in the top 100 for several years straight, to being unpopular all over again.
The name Engla can be traced back to the Germanic name element engel, which referred to the Angles (as in “Anglo-Saxon”).
The Swedish royal family caused some controversy back in 2012 when Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel named their baby girl Estelle.
One Swedish journalist said the name was “a very strange choice which I believe will be much discussed.” He added: “Estelle sounds like the name of a nightclub queen.”
Many speculated that the princess was named after American-born Countess Estelle Bernadotte (1904-1984) in order to make a political statement. Estelle’s husband Folke Bernadotte (son of Ebba Munck) was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1948, and one of the people behind the murder was future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.
Regardless of the reason it was chosen, the Princess’s name is now more popular than ever before in Sweden. Usage dipped right after she was born, but rebounded a few years later:
2017: 75 baby girls named Estelle in Sweden
2016: 70 baby girls named Estelle in Sweden
2015: 43 baby girls named Estelle in Sweden
2014: 45 baby girls named Estelle in Sweden
2013: 33 baby girls named Estelle in Sweden
2012: 55 baby girls named Estelle in Sweden
2011: 64 baby girls named Estelle in Sweden
2010: 53 baby girls named Estelle in Sweden
2009: 38 baby girls named Estelle in Sweden
2008: 41 baby girls named Estelle in Sweden
It didn’t come close to hitting the top 10 in 2017, but did rank somewhere around 145th.
According to one source, “[t]he name Estelle fits into a smallish trend in Sweden, where names of French origin — or just French-sounding — are slowly becoming popular. Some other names in this group are: Amélie, Celine, Leonie and Noelle.”
Country singer Dolly Parton was born to parents Avie Lee and Robert Lee Parton in Tennessee 1946. She was the fourth of a dozen children: six boys and six girls. The names of all twelve, in order, are:
A few weeks ago, I got an email from a reader looking for lists of old-fashioned double names. She was aiming for names like Thelma Dean, Eula Mae, and Gaynell — names that would have sounded trendy in the early 1900s. She also mentioned that she’d started a list of her own.
So I began scouring the interwebs. I tracked down lists of old-fashioned names, and lists of double names…but I couldn’t find a decent list of double names that were also old-fashioned.
I loved the idea of such a list, though, so I suggested that we work together to create one. She generously sent me the pairings she’d collected so far, and I used several different records databases to find many more.
I restricted my search to names given to girls born in the U.S. from 1890 to 1930. I also stuck to double names that I found written as single names, because it’s very likely that these pairings were used together in real life (i.e., that they were true double names and not merely first-middle pairings).
Pairings that seemed too timeless, like Maria Mae and Julia Rose, were omitted. I also took out many of the pairings that feature now-trendy names — think Ella, Emma, and Lucy — because they just don’t sound old-fashioned anymore (though they would have a few decades ago).
The result isn’t exhaustive, but it’s a decent sampling of real-life, old-fashioned double names. I’ve organized them by second name, and I also added links to popularity graphs for names that were in the SSA data during the correct time period (early 1900s).
I spotted plenty of other combinations that just didn’t happen to be written as single names in the records, so here’s a handy dandy little table to cover some of the other existing combinations…
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