How popular is the baby name Franklin 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 Franklin.

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Popularity of the baby name Franklin


Posts that mention the name Franklin

Baby names with OO: Cooper, Brooklyn, Rooney

raccoon in a tree

Looking for baby names that feature the letter-pair OO?

I’ve collected oodles of OO names for you in this post!

Before we get to the names, though, let’s get one big question out of the way…

What sound does OO make?

In today’s English, OO commonly makes the sound you hear in the words boot, food, and moon. But it can also make other sounds, such as the ones you hear in the words blood, or door, or good.

Why all this diversity?

A lot of it has to do with the Great Vowel Shift, which lasted from the late 14th century until about 1700. The GVS was a major factor in the transition from Middle English to Modern English.

In Middle English, OO tended to make a “long o” sound. (As one of my sources explained, “scribes often indicated a long vowel sound by doubling the vowel letter.”) So, in Middle English, the words boot, food, and moon sounded more like “boat,” “foad,” and “moan.”

During the Great Vowel Shift, the pronunciation of most long vowel sounds inexplicably shifted “upward” in the mouth, and the words boot, food, and moon acquired their present-day pronunciations.

But it’s not quite as simple as that. Because some words underwent multiple pronunciation changes during the GVS, while others didn’t undergo any change at all.

And this resulted in OO having a variety of pronunciations in Modern English.

Now, back to the names!

Names with OO

Below are dozens of names that feature the letter-pair OO. Most of these names come directly from the U.S. SSA’s baby name data.

  • Ajooni
  • Alanood
  • Anoop
  • Aroosh
  • Atwood
  • Avnoor
  • Aynoor
  • Batool
  • Bloom
  • Booker
  • Boomer
  • Boone
  • Booth
  • Brentwood
  • Brooke, Brook
  • Brookelle
  • Brooker
  • Brookie
  • Brooklee, Brookley, Brookleigh
  • Brooklyn, Brooklynn, Brooklynne, Brooklin, Brooklinn, Brooklen, Brooklenn, Brookelyn, Brookelynn, Brookelynne
  • Brooks, Brookes, Broox
  • Brooksie
  • Brooksley
  • Brookson
  • Brookston
  • Cooke
  • Coolidge, Cooledge
  • Cooper, Kooper
  • Dawood
  • Delwood
  • Derwood, Durwood
  • Eastwood
  • Eknoor
  • Elwood, Ellwood
  • Farooq
  • Fleetwood
  • Garwood
  • Glenwood, Glennwood
  • Goodluck
  • Goodman
  • Goodness
  • Goodwin
  • Greenwood
  • Gurnoor
  • Hagood
  • Ha-Joon
  • Harnoor
  • Haroon
  • Harwood
  • Haywood, Heywood
  • Hooper
  • Hoor
  • Hoorain
  • Hooria, Hooriya
  • Hoover
  • Htoo
  • Japnoor
  • Jasnoor
  • Ji-Hoo
  • Ji-Soo
  • Jood
  • Joon
  • Joory
  • Joost
  • Kenwood
  • Kirkwood
  • Kohinoor
  • Kulsoom
  • Leeloo
  • Lenwood
  • Lindwood
  • Linwood
  • Lockwood
  • Lynwood, Lynnwood
  • Mahmood
  • Mahnoor
  • Manroop
  • Mansoor
  • Marwood
  • Masooma
  • Maysoon
  • Maywood
  • Moo
  • Moon
  • Moosa
  • Nooh
  • Noomi
  • Noor
  • Noora, Noorah
  • Nooreh
  • Noori
  • Nooria, Nooriyah
  • Noorseen
  • Noortje
  • Noorulain
  • Norwood
  • Oona, Oonagh
  • Oormi
  • Osgood
  • Prabhnoor
  • Poorna
  • Raywood
  • Roo
  • Roohi
  • Rook
  • Rooney
  • Roop
  • Roope
  • Roosevelt
  • Rooster
  • Seabrooke
  • Sherwood
  • Shooter
  • Sookie
  • Stanwood
  • Sun-Woo
  • Underwood
  • Westbrook
  • Wood
  • Woodard
  • Woodensley
  • Woodfin
  • Woodford
  • Woodland
  • Woodley
  • Woodlyn
  • Woodrow
  • Woodruff
  • Woods
  • Woodson
  • Woodward
  • Woody, Woodie
  • Woo-Jin
  • Yaqoob
  • Yaqoot
  • Yoona
  • Zaroon
  • Zooey

A number of the above represent transferred usage of various English surnames — particularly those that contain words like “wood,” “good,” and “brook.”

Speaking of surnames (and surnames being used as first names), did you know that five U.S. presidents had OO-names? Weirdly, all five served during the first half of the 20th century:

  • Theodore Roosevelt (in office from 1901 to 1909)
  • Woodrow Wilson (1913 to 1921)
  • Calvin Coolidge (1923 to 1929)
  • Herbert Hoover (1929 to 1933)
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933 to 1945)

Which of all the OO names above to do you like most? (Can you think of any that I missed?) Let me know in the comments!

Sources:

Image: Adapted from Raton laveur commun (Procyon lotor) by Clément Bardot under CC BY-SA 4.0.

The 6 siblings of Burl Ives

Singer/actor Burl Ives (1909-1995)
Burl Ives

Grammy-winning singer and Oscar-winning actor Burl Ives was born in rural Illinois in 1909. His birth name? Burl Icle Ivanhoe Ives.

I don’t know the story behind his unique given names, but I do know that his parents, Levi Franklin (“Frank”) and Cordellia (“Dellie”), gave several of their six other children interesting names as well:

  1. Audry Jane, b. 1899
  2. Artie Morris, b. 1901
  3. Clarence Estie, b. 1903
  4. Argola Marie, b. 1906
  5. Burl Icle Ivanhoe, b. 1909
  6. Lilburn Verger, b. 1914
  7. Norma, b. 1919

(During that area, the next-door state of Missouri had a community called Argola — I wonder if that’s where Argola Marie’s name came from…?)

Today, Burl Ives may be best remembered as the voice of Sam the Snowman in the 1964 stop-motion TV movie Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer — the longest-running Christmas special in history.

What are your thoughts on the first name Burl?

(And…did you know that Rudolph was almost named Reginald?)

Sources:

Image: Burl Ives – LOC

Baby name story: Albert Dirk Thomas Franklin

Liberation of the Netherlands, 1945
Liberation of the Netherlands, 1945

The Netherlands were occupied by German forces for most of WWII.

During that time, many Dutch Jews went into hiding. The Bouwman family of Haarlem, for instance, was split up between two homes: Parents Mozes and Sophie Bouwman hid with one family, while their children Lion and Koosje hid with another.

In early 1944, Sophie discovered that she was pregnant. Registering a baby would have been dangerous, both for her and for the family sheltering her, so a plan was hatched: a nearby childless couple (Vivian and Catherine Rowe) would stage a fake pregnancy, and, when Sophie gave birth, the Rowes would take the baby in and pretend it was their own.

On September 2, 1944, Sophie — being “attended by a doctor and nurses sworn to secrecy” — welcomed a baby boy.

The child was named Albert Dirk in honor of the two men who had helped the Bouwmans find a home for their other two children.

As planned, over the next couple of days, the baby was smuggled out of the hospital and transported (via bicycle) to the home of the childless couple.

On September 4, the Rowes “joyfully announced the birth of a son, whom they named Thomas Franklin.” Notably, they took care of him through the hunger winter of 1944-45, “selling many of their personal possessions in order to buy food for him.”

Finally, in May of 1945, the war ended. They baby could be returned to his parents.

As an expression of gratitude, the Bouwmans added the name the Rowes had given him to his original name.

Though I couldn’t find any official records for the baby, at least one family tree website suggests that he was indeed given all four names: Albert Dirk Thomas Franklin Bouwman.

Sources:

Image: Allied planes over Holland – Nationaal Archief

Toledo brothers named One & Two

Headstone of Two Stickney (1810-1862)
Two Stickney’s headstone

In the mid-1830s, the state of Ohio and the territory of Michigan fought over a 468-square-mile strip of land containing Toledo. Their border dispute became known as the Toledo War.

During that period, tensions between the two regions ran high. At one point, for instance, the sheriff of Michigan’s Monroe County took to arresting “anyone in the Ohio strip who was promoting Toledo going to Ohio.”

Map of the disputed strip of land between Michigan and Ohio.
The disputed strip of land between Michigan and Ohio

His arrests included “one of Toledo’s founding fathers,” Benjamin Franklin Stickney. Originally from New England — and named after his mother’s uncle, the actual Benjamin Franklin — Stickney had moved his family westward in 1812 after being appointed as an Indian Agent at Fort Wayne.

By the time he arrived in Fort Wayne, Mr. Stickney already had fostered a reputation as an odd personality and independent thinker. The eccentric rap came largely from Mr. Stickney’s decision to name his sons One and Two.

His apparent reasoning, according to legend, was that the boys could name themselves when they grew older, but they never did. Mr. Stickney had wanted to name his three daughters after states, but his wife forbid it for the first two. He won out after the birth of his last child, born at Fort Wayne in 1817. He called her Indiana.

(One Stickney was born in 1803. Two Stickney was born in 1810. Between them were two daughters named Louisa and Mary. The fifth baby was indeed named after the state of Indiana, but her name was spelled “Indianna.”)

Stickney’s arrest angered his son Two, who ended up stabbing the Monroe County sheriff in the side with a pen knife in July of 1835. This non-fatal injury was the only casualty in the nearly-bloodless Toledo War.

The conflict finally ended in mid-1836, when the U.S. Congress proposed a compromise. Ohio would be given the disputed strip of land (and the city of Toledo), while Michigan would be given statehood and the remainder of the Upper Peninsula.

Sources:

Image (2nd one): Adapted from Disputed Toledo Strip by Drdpw under CC BY-SA 3.0.

P.S. Other families with number-names include the Rosado family of Brazil and Ten & Decillian Million of Washington state.