How popular is the baby name Leslie 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 Leslie.
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Tuesday’s post about the Victorian-style Tylney Hall Hotel reminded me of a list of Victorian-era names that I’ve had bookmarked forever.
The list was created by amateur genealogist G. M. Atwater as a resource for writers. It contains names and name combinations that were commonly seen in the U.S. from the 1840s to the 1890s. Below is the full list (with a few minor changes).
| Victorian Era Female Names | Victorian Era Male Names |
|---|---|
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Which female name and male name do you like best?
Last week, two women named Tammy won elections: Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin was elected to the U.S. Senate, and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Do you think this could be enough to revive the baby name Tammy?
The name started popping up in the U.S. baby name data in the 1930s. It was in the top 1,000 by the late 1940s, and was extremely popular by the late 1950s:
What caused the surge in popularity?
The romantic comedy Tammy and the Bachelor (1957), which featured a naïve country girl named Tammy Tyree (played by Debbie Reynolds).
Early in the movie, Tammy and her grandfather rescued a man named Peter Brent (played by Leslie Nielsen) from a plane crash. Here’s how Tammy breathlessly explained her name to Peter:
I’m Tammy, my baptized name is Tambrey (it means immortal), my full name is Tammy Tyree only folks call me Tammy.
Even more influential than the character, though, was the movie’s memorable theme song, “Tammy,” which was performed by Reynolds herself:
Reynolds’ version, as well as versions by other performers, reached #1 on Billboard’s Honor Roll Of Hits chart for seven weeks straight from August to October of 1957.
(The Honor Roll was a pre-Hot 100 chart that combined various recordings of each song into single list items, resulting in consolidated rankings.)
The film and the song popularized not just the name Tammy, but also a slew of other Tam-names, including Tambra, Tamela, Tamera, Tami, Tamie, Tammi, Tammie, Tamra, Tamara, and Tambrey — the character’s “baptized name.” :)
The name Tamre, which debuted in 1958, was the top debut name for baby girls that year.
The name Tammy stayed popular through the ’60s, thanks to two more Tammy films (1961 & 1963) and a short-lived TV series (1965-1966). It was one of the top ten baby girl names in the nation in 1964 and from 1966 to 1971. (Tammy Baldwin was born in 1962, and Tammy Duckworth in 1968.)
After that, Tammy began sinking. It dropped out of the top 100 in 1981, out of the top 1,000 in 1992, and continues to fall every year:
Do you think the national coverage of Tammy Baldwin and Tammy Duckworth in 2012 could reverse this trend? (Even if just for a year?)
P.S. The song “Tammy” was composed by the songwriters who created “Que Sera, Sera,” and it was popular at the same time as “Diana” by Paul Anka.
Sources: Tammy and the Bachelor (1957) – TCM, Tammy (song) – Wikipedia, SSA
The comic strip Dondi was first published in September of 1955.
The strip featured a six-year-old Italian “mid-European” boy who was orphaned during WWII. When he was discovered by American soldiers, he was looking for his parents, crying out donde* (“where” in Spanish), so the soldiers dubbed him Dondi. He was discovered and befriended by a pair of American G.I.s who’d found him “cowering behind a rubble heap.”
When the soldiers were ordered back to the U.S., Dondi inadvertently smuggled himself into the U.S. by boarding the same boat as his “buddies.” Eventually he was adopted by one of the soldiers and “the early focus of the strip was Dondi’s discovery of America.”
In 1956, the name Dondi appeared for the first time — both as a boy name and as a girl name — in the U.S. baby name data:
| Boys named Dondi | Girls named Dondi | |
| 1962 | 48 | 24 |
| 1961 | 50† | 19 |
| 1960 | 17 | 10 |
| 1959 | 14 | . |
| 1958 | 23 | 5 |
| 1957 | 32 | . |
| 1956 | 19* | 7* |
| 1955 | . | . |
One of Dondi’s first namesakes was Stephen Dondi Thomas, born in late 1955 to Mr. and Mrs. Leslie F. Thomas of Dayton, Ohio.
The Thomases named him as they did because the illegal entry problems of the comic strip Dondi closely paralleled the experience of their daughter, Janie, 4.
Born in Italy to an Italian mother and an American father, Janie was facing deportation under the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Both the strip and the name peaked in popularity in the early ’60s. The strip ran until 1986; the name last appeared in the SSA data in 2002.
*Is donde used in Italian? Should the strip’s writers have used dove instead?
Update, Sept. 2017: My sources were wrong! I finally checked out the original strip. Turns out that Dondi’s name was not from donde — an explanation that never made much sense anyway — but from someone calling him a “dondi boy” (dandy boy). Here’s some of the Dondi dialogue that ran in mid-October, 1955:
“All right now, sonny, tell us your name.”
“My name Dondi!”
“Dondi what? What is your last name?”
“Dondi last name I ever have.”
“Come now, Dondi, didn’t you ever have some other name?”
“Long time ago pretty lady is holding me and saying ‘you dondiboy.’ So everybody is calling me Dondi.”
According to an interview with strip co-creator Irwin Hasen, the “pretty lady” was a Red Cross worker.
Sources:
Looking for a set of baby names with something in common? If so, here are some 6-letter anagram names for you to check out!
Anagrams are words that contain the same set of letters, but not in the same sequence. For instance, the words “listen,” “silent,” and “tinsel” are all anagrams of one another.
Anagram names can be a neat option for siblings — particularly multiples (like twins and triplets). They’re also a clever way to connect a baby name to the name of an older relative (e.g., grandpa Weston, grandson Townes).
Below are hundreds of six-letter names (collected from the SSA’s huge database of U.S. baby names) that happen to be anagrams of other names.
Which pairing/group do you like best? Let me know in the comments!
To see anagram names of other lengths, check out these lists of 3-letter anagram names, 4-letter anagram names, 5-letter anagram names, 7-letter anagram names, and 8-letter anagram names.
[Latest update: April 2023]