How popular is the baby name Horace 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 Horace.

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Popularity of the baby name Horace


Posts that mention the name Horace

How did Charles Lindbergh influence baby names in 1927?

Exactly 85 years ago today, 25-year-old Air Mail pilot Charles Lindbergh was in the middle of his non-stop, solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean.

His successful journey from New York City to Paris, which lasted from about 8 am on May 20 until about 10:30 pm on May 21, 1927, earned Lindbergh the $25,000 Orteig Prize and made him world-famous virtually overnight.

According to SSA data, hundreds of baby boys were named Lindbergh that year:

  • 1930: 31 baby boys named Lindbergh
  • 1929: 40 baby boys named Lindbergh
  • 1928: 71 baby boys named Lindbergh (rank: 771st)
  • 1927: 116 baby boys named Lindbergh (rank: 574th) [peak usage]
  • 1926: 12 baby boys named Lindbergh
  • 1925: 7 baby boys named Lindbergh [debut]
  • 1924: unlisted

Though the data makes it look like dozens of babies were named “Lindbergh” prior to May of 1927, that’s probably not the case. It’s much more likely that these babies simply remained nameless until the event occurred. (At that time it wasn’t uncommon for American parents to wait months, sometimes years, to settle on a name. Emancipation Proclamation Coggeshall wasn’t named until she was two and a half, for instance.)

Hundreds more got the diminutive form Lindy:

  • 1930: 64 baby boys named Lindy (rank: 813th)
  • 1929: 84 baby boys named Lindy (rank: 669th)
  • 1928: 177 baby boys named Lindy (rank: 454th)
  • 1927: 235 baby boys named Lindy (rank: 388th) [peak usage]
  • 1926: 29 baby boys named Lindy
  • 1925: 10 baby boys named Lindy
  • 1924: 6 baby boys named Lindy

I spotted a boy named Lindbergh Long in a mid-1932 issue of North Carolina Christian Advocate. His age wasn’t mentioned, but he was probably born circa 1927.

Photo of child named Lindbergh Long in the religious newspaper "North Carolina Christian Advocate" (1932).

The variant spellings Lindberg, Lindburgh and Lindburg also got a boost in 1927. The latter two debuted in the data that year, in fact.

And, of course, many babies were given the first-middle combo “Charles Lindbergh.” The following Charles Lindbergh babies made the news:

  • Charles Lindbergh, son of Mr. and Mrs. Horace E. Lindbergh of Cambridge, MA
  • Charles Lindbergh Bohannon, son of Mr. and Mrs. Bohannon of La Jolla, San Diego, CA
  • Charles Lindbergh Erickson, son of Mrs. and Mrs. Carl W. Erickson of Worcester, MA
  • Charles Lindbergh Hurley, son of Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Hurley of Sea Cliff, Long Island, NY

A few years later, in 1931, a Canadian baby who made headlines for being born in an airplane was also named after Lindbergh.

Sources:

  • “3 Babies Are Given Name of Air Ace.” Painesville Telegraph 23 May 1927: 1.
  • “New Born Baby Gets Lindbergh’s Name.” Border Cities Star [Windsor, Ontario, Canada] 23 May 1927: 14.
  • “San Diego Baby Is Named for Aviator.” Prescott Evening Courier 8 Jun. 1927: 1.

Images: Lindbergh Received the Distinguished Flying Cross, North Carolina Christian Advocate

P.S. Some other aviators I’ve written about: Jack Vilas, Belvin Maynard, Lester Maitland, Bessica Raiche, Turi Widerøe.

Baby name story: Pannonica

Pannonica de Koenigswarter (1913-1988)
Pannonica de Koenigswarter

Baroness Pannonica “Nica” de Koenigswarter was a wealthy jazz enthusiast who befriended and supported Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and others.

Nica knew all the great New York jazzmen and helped them, whether by buying groceries, acting as an occasional ambulance service, paying overdue rent, getting musicians’ instrument out of hock or making hospital visits.

She was born Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild in late 1913, the fourth child of banker and naturalist Charles Rothschild (of the Rothschild family) and Hungarian baroness Rozsika Edle von Wertheimstein.

The story behind her second middle name isn’t quite clear.

At the beginning of this live recording of his song “Pannonica” [vid], Thelonious Monk says, “I think her father gave her that name after a butterfly that he tried to catch. I don’t think he caught the butterfly.”

Nica’s great niece Hannah Rothschild says it wasn’t a butterfly, but a rare type of moth, Eublemma pannonica.

According to The Gallery at Hermès, which exhibited some of Pannonica’s photographs in 2008, she was “named for a wild plant of eastern Europe’s Pannonia Plain, noted as a habitat of moths – which were a passion of her father’s.”

The specifics of Pannonica’s name story may not be known, but any species called “pannonica” would indeed be endemic to the Pannonian Plain in east-central Europe. The Plain was named after the ancient Roman province Pannonia, which in turn was named after the Pannonians of Illyria.

Nica de Koenigswarter passed away in 1988, but her name lives on the titles of several jazz songs including “Pannonica” by Monk (mentioned above), “Nica’s Tempo” [vid] by Gigi Gryce, “Nica Steps Out” by Freddie Redd and “Nica’s Dream” by Horace Silver.

It also lives on in the name of a great-granddaughter, Pannonica Fabien “Nica” de Koenigswarter, born in 1987. (And this Pannonica has a younger brother fittingly named Jonah Thelonius.)

Sources:

Image: Pannonica de Koenigswarter

Where did the baby name Acquanetta come from?

Actress Burnu Acquanetta
Burnu Acquanetta

Back in the 1940s and early 1950s, an actress called Burnu Acquanetta — sometimes billed simply as “Acquanetta” — starred in a string of campy B-movies. She played an ape-woman in Captive Wild Woman (1943) and Jungle Woman (1944), a leopard-woman in Tarzan and the Leopard Woman (1946), and a native girl in Lost Continent (1951).

As a result, the rare name Acquanetta began popping up in the U.S. baby name data in the mid-1940s:

  • 1948: 12 baby girls named Acquanetta
  • 1947: 5 baby girls named Acquanetta
  • 1946: 13 baby girls named Acquanetta
  • 1945: 6 baby girls named Acquanetta
  • 1944: 6 baby girls named Acquanetta [debut]
  • 1943: unlisted
  • 1942: unlisted

At the height of the name’s popularity in the early 1950s, the variants Aquanetta and Acquanette popped up. Later the same decade, we see the very Aqua Net-like Aquanette.

So what’s the origin of “Acquanetta”?

A LIFE article from 1942 stated that both of Acquanetta’s parents were Native American and that her surname meant “laughing water.” Her 2004 obituary in The Independent says she claimed to be “part-Arapaho Indian and part-English aristocrat” and that her name means “burning fire, deep water.”

But a Jet article from the early ’50s tells us the truth: Burnu Acquanetta’s legal name was Mildred Davenport. Census records show that she was born in South Carolina and raised in Pennsylvania. (So was her brother, Horace Davenport, who became the first African-American judge in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.)

The stage names “Burnu” and “Acquanetta” aren’t genuine Native American names at all, then, but fanciful creations based on the words burn and aqua. They must have sounded exotic enough to pass as Native American back in the 1940s, though.

What are your thoughts on the name Acquanetta?

Sources:

Image: Clipping from the cover of Jet magazine (14 Feb. 1952)