How popular is the baby name Gale 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 Gale.

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Popularity of the baby name Gale


Posts that mention the name Gale

The “most unisex” baby names in the U.S.

pink and blue cupcakes

Last month, FlowingData crunched some numbers to come up with the 35 most unisex baby names in the U.S. since 1930. Here’s the list:

  1. Jessie
  2. Marion
  3. Jackie
  4. Alva
  5. Ollie
  6. Jody
  7. Cleo
  8. Kerry
  9. Frankie
  10. Guadalupe
  11. Carey
  12. Tommie
  13. Angel
  14. Hollis
  15. Sammie
  16. Jamie
  17. Kris
  18. Robbie
  19. Tracy
  20. Merrill
  21. Noel
  22. Rene
  23. Johnnie
  24. Ariel
  25. Jan
  26. Devon
  27. Cruz
  28. Michel
  29. Gale
  30. Robin
  31. Dorian
  32. Casey
  33. Dana
  34. Kim**
  35. Shannon

I’m not sure exactly what criteria were used to create the rankings, but it looks like the top unisex names on this list were the top-1,000 names that “stuck around that 50-50 split” the longest from 1930 to 2012.

The FlowingData post also mentions that, though the data is pretty noisy, there might be “a mild upward trend” over the years in the number of babies with a unisex name.

**In 1957, Johnny Carson’s 5-year-old son Kim had his name changed to Richard because he’d been having “a little trouble over his name being mistaken for a girl’s.”

Source: The most unisex names in US history

Image: Adapted from Gallery 1 by Sarah Howells under CC BY-SA 3.0.

[Latest update: Nov. 2013]

2 Babies born during wind storms, named Gale

hurricane

1945: While an unnamed Category 4 hurricane was pummeling south Florida on September 15, 1945, Lt. and Mrs. Carl Landau (who were staying at a shelter in West Palm Beach) welcomed a baby girl. They named her Karen Gale.

1950: During the gusty Great Appalachian Storm of November 24-25, 1950, Mr. and Mrs. Donald Quinn of Burlington, Vermont, welcomed a baby girl. They named her Gale.

(And don’t forget Barbara Gale, named for Hurricane Barbara in 1953.)

Sources:

  • “Baby Born in Storm Gets Name of Gale.” Los Angeles Times 17 Sep. 1945: 1.
  • “Named for Storm.” Eugene Register-Guard 12 Dec 1950: 23.
  • “Storm Speeds Toward Georgia, South Carolina Coast.” Sun [Baltimore] 17 Sep. 1945: 1.

Image: Adapted from Hurricane Elena by NASA (public domain)

Barbara Gale: The first hurricane-inspired baby name?

hurricane

In 1950, the United States Weather Bureau started naming Atlantic hurricanes and tropical storms.

The initial names came from a radio alphabet that began Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy, Fox and George. Because the alphabet happened to include several human names, you could say the first Atlantic storms that were “named” were the Charlies and Georges of 1950-1952.

It wasn’t until three years later that the USWB starting using human names exclusively. In 1953, it replaced the phonetic alphabet with a list of female names. (Male names weren’t thrown into the mix until 1979.)

The first storm with a female name was Tropical Storm Alice — the first storm of the 1953 storm season. I couldn’t find any babies named after Alice, but I did find one named after the second storm, Hurricane Barbara.

Hurricane Barbara traveled up the Eastern seaboard in mid-August. It struck the Outer Banks (islands off the North Carolina coast) on August 13. That night, a baby girl born in New Bern, N.C., to Mr. and Mrs. N. E. Ward was named Barbara Gale.

There were six other named storms (Carol, Dolly, Edna, Florence, Gail and Hazel) that season, but I could only find a namesake for one of them — Florence.

Hurricane Florence struck the Florida panhandle on September 26. Earlier that day, a baby born in Crestview, Florida, to Mr. and Mrs. Curtis Holt was named Sandra Florence.

Since 1953, many more babies — hundreds, probably — have been named for Atlantic hurricanes. Hurricane-inspired baby names I’ve written about here include Hazel (1954), Alicia (1983), Elena (1985), Gloria (1985), Andrew (1992) and Isabel (2003).

P.S. One of the things that helped popularize the idea of naming hurricanes in the first place was George R. Stewart’s book Storm (1941), which also had an influence on the baby name Mariah.

Sources:

Image: Adapted from Hurricane Elena by NASA (public domain)

Gale Storm named her baby after a TV character

Gale Storm

Actress and singer Gale Storm wasn’t born with that name — she was born Josephine Owaissa Cottle in Texas in 1922. (Her four older siblings were named Lois, Wilbur, Minnie, and Joel.)

Her first name came from her paternal grandmother, and her unusual middle was chosen by her older sister Lois. Here’s how she explained it:

Owaissa means bluebird in Indian. They let my sister name me and she was going through an Indian period then.

Lois had likely encountered the name in school, via Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 poem “The Song of Hiawatha” — a fictional account of an Ojibwe warrior named Hiawatha. The name is indeed defined as “bluebird” in the poem, though the Ojibwe word for “bluebird” is actually more along the lines of ozahwunoo.

In her late teens, Josephine became a contestant on a radio talent show called Gateway to Hollywood. She ended up winning, and was awarded not only a contract with a movie studio, but a brand new name: Gale Storm. The male winner, Lee Bonnell, who was given the stage name Terry Belmont, later became Gale’s real-life husband.

Gale and Terry went on to have four children. Their three sons were named after the Biblical figures of Philip, Peter and Paul. But their daughter, born in 1956, was not named with a Biblical figure in mind. Instead, she was named after fictional cruise director Susanna Pomeroy — the character Gale Storm portrayed on The Gale Storm Show: Oh! Susanna from 1956 to 1960.

Sources: