How popular is the baby name Lillie 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 Lillie.

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Popularity of the baby name Lillie


Posts that mention the name Lillie

Popular baby names in Newfoundland and Labrador (Canada), 2014

According to data from the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, the most popular baby names in 2014 were Olivia and Jackson (and variants).

Here are the Canadian province’s top 10 girl names and top 10 boy names of 2014:

Girl NamesBoy Names
1. Olivia
2. Emma
3. Lily/Lilly/Lillie
4. Ava/Avah
5. Averee/Averie/Avery/Avierie
6. Ella
7. Emilee/Emily
8. Chloe/Khloe
9. Madison
10. Sadie		1. Jackson/Jaxon/Jaxxon/Jaxxen/Jaxen
2. Liam
3. Jack
4. Benjamin
5. Jacob/Jakob/Jaycob
6. Luke
7. Mason
8. Nathan
9. Noah
10. William

On the boys’ list, Jacob,* Luke, Mason, Nathan and Noah replaced Owen, Carter,* Chase, Ryan, and Aidan*.

On the girls’ list, Ella, Madison and Sadie replaced Sophia,* Sarah,* and Hailey,*

Sadie, now 10th, was way down in 55th in 2013. Olivia, the current #1 name, was only in 8th place the previous year.

Regions with smaller populations tend to see more volatility in their baby name rankings from year to year. For scale, the population of Newfoundland and Labrador is a bit lower than that of Wyoming, the least populous U.S. state.

*”and variants”

Source: Top 100 Baby Names – Open Data Newfoundland and Labrador

Popular baby names in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1867

19th-century Providence, Rhode Island
19th-century Providence

The registrar of Providence, Rhode Island, published a series of documents listing all “of the names of persons deceased, born and married in the city of Providence” during years 1866, 1867 and 1868. The series may have been longer, but these are the only documents I could find online.

I’ve finally finished creating a set of rankings using one of the documents — 1867. But before we get to the rankings, here are some stats:

  • 1,547 babies were born in Providence in 1867, going by the number of babies listed in the document itself. According to the document’s introduction, though, the number is 1,625. Not sure what to make of this discrepancy.
  • 1,431 of these babies (713 girls and 718 boys) had names that were registered with the government at the time of publication. The other 116 babies got blank spaces. Either their names hadn’t been registered yet, or they hadn’t been named yet, or perhaps they died young and never received a name.
  • 254 unique names (141 girl names and 113 boy names) were shared among these 1,431 babies.

And now, on to the names…

Top 5

A quick look at the top 5 girl names and boy names in Providence in 1867:

Top baby girl namesTop baby boy names
1. Mary
2. Catherine
3. Ellen
4. Margaret
5. Sarah		1. John
2. William
3. James
4. Charles
5. George

All Girl Names

Notice how the #1 name, Mary, was bestowed three times as often as the #2 name, Catherine.

  1. Mary, 138 baby girls
  2. Catherine, 46
  3. Ellen, 37
  4. Margaret, 34
  5. Sarah, 31
  6. Annie, 19
  7. Elizabeth, 16
  8. Alice, 15
  9. Florence, 14
  10. Ann, Emma & Ida, 12 each (3-way tie)
  11. Minnie, 11
  12. Harriet & Julia, 9 each (2-way tie)
  13. Anna, Caroline, Carrie, Jennie, Joanna & Louisa, 8 each (6-way tie)
  14. Cora & Eliza, 7 each (2-way tie)
  15. Agnes, Clara, Edith, Rosanna & Theresa, 6 each (5-way tie)
  16. Bertha, Grace, Hannah, Hattie, Jane, Lillian, Maria, Martha, Nellie & Susan, 5 each (10-way tie)
  17. Eleanor, Fannie, Gertrude, Helen, Isabella, Lucy & Rosa, 4 each (7-way tie)
  18. Anne, Bridget, Ella, Emily, Esther, Eva, Lizzie, Mabel, Matilda & Ruth, 3 each (10-way tie)
  19. Ada, Amelia, Charlotte, Dora, Eleanora, Elvira, Henrietta, Jessie, Josephine, Kate, Louise, Lydia, Maggie & Rosella, 2 each (14-way tie)
  20. Abby, Addie, Adelaide, Adelia, Almina, Almira, Amanda, Amey, Amy, Anastasia, Angelie, Annis, Antoinette, Augusta, Aurelia, Bethiah, Cecelia, Celia, Clarissa, Clementina, Corielynn, Cornelia, Drusilla, Effie, Emeline, Estella, Ethelin, Fanny, Florentina, Frances, Gelie, Genevieve, Georgiana, Georgianna, Helena, Honora, Irene, Isabel, Issie, Juliann, Julietta, Katie, Laura, Leah, Leonora, Lillie, Lillis, Lily, Lottie, Luella, Margaretta, Margery, Margret, Marietta, Maude, May, Millie, Myra, Nelly, Phebe, Robie, Rosalthe, Rose, Selina, Sophia, Susanna, Susannah, Vienna, Viola, Vira, Virginia & Winifred, 1 each (72-way tie)

All Boy Names

  1. John, 87 baby boys
  2. William, 75
  3. James, 64
  4. Charles, 50
  5. George, 45
  6. Thomas, 40
  7. Joseph, 30
  8. Walter, 21
  9. Edward, 16
  10. Francis & Michael, 14 each (2-way tie)
  11. Patrick, 13
  12. Arthur & Robert, 12 each (2-way tie)
  13. Frank, Frederick & Henry, 11 each (3-way tie)
  14. Albert, 9
  15. Daniel & Peter, 8 each (2-way tie)
  16. David, Eugene, Howard & Samuel, 6 each (4-way tie)
  17. Alexander, Louis & Stephen, 5 each (3-way tie)
  18. Harry, Herbert, Hugh & Martin, 4 each (4-way tie)
  19. Carl, Edgar, Everett, Jeremiah & Willie, 3 each (5-way tie)
  20. Abraham, Alfred, Clarence, Cornelius, Dennis, Ernest, Ezra, Franklin, Freddie, Jacob, Jesse, Lewis, Luke, Nicholas, Philip, Sylvester, Theodore, Timothy, 2 each (18-way tie)
  21. Abner, Adam, Adolph, Amos, Andrew, Appleton, Archibald, Ashel, August, Benjamin, Benno, Bernard, Bertram, Burt, Byron, Clifford, Davis, Dexter, Dunlap, Edmund, Edwin, Elmer,* Embert, Forrest, Freddy, Gustav, Herman, Isaac, Jeffrey, Jerome, Josiah, Lucian, Malcolm, Matthew, Maurice, Milton, Nathan, Nehemiah, Nelson, Oren, Oscar, Otto, Owen, Paul, Ralph, Reginald, Richard, Sanford, Seth, Shirley, Sullivan, Terence, Theobald, Victor, Wanton, Warren, Weston, Wheelan, Wilford, 1 each (59-way tie)

*Elmer, who had the middle initial “E.,” was likely named after early Civil War casualty Elmer E. Ellsworth.

Twins & Triplets

Twenty-one sets of twins and two sets of triplets were born in Providence in 1867. (All of these names were accounted for above — I just thought it’d be fun to check out the sibsets.)

Girl-girl twinsGirl-boy twinsBoy-boy twinsTriplets
Annie & Fannie
Annie & Mary
Ann & Ellen
Jennie & Minnie
Margaret & Martha
(blank) & (blank)		Ann & Maurice
Grace & George
Harriet & Albert
Ida & Ashel
Mary & James		Abraham & George
Charles & George
Charles & John
Daniel & David
Dunlap & Frank
Eugene & Timothy
George & John
George & William
James & John
John & Martin		Carl, (blank) & (blank)
James, Alexander & Sarah

I’ll post Providence’s 1866 and 1868 rankings as soon I get them done. Until then, here are two older posts featuring uniquely named Rhode Islanders: Aldaberontophoscophornia (b. 1812) and Idawalley (b. 1842).

Sources:

Where did the baby name Seena come from in 1917?

Movie actress Seena Owen (1894-1966)
Seena Owen

First there was Francelia. Then there was Ormi. And today we have Seena — the third name (I know of) to debut on the U.S. baby name charts thanks to the influence of a silent film actress.

That actress was Seena Owen, and she’s a special case, as she’s the first actress on my list to become popular under a stage name.

Signe Auen was born in Washington state in 1894. Her parents were immigrants from Denmark, and she had older siblings named Lillie (who became a screenwriter) and Audun.

The Scandinavian name Signe can be traced back to the Old Norse name Signý, which is made up on the elements sigr, meaning “victory,” and ný, meaning “new.”

Signe Auen began appearing in films in late 1914.

Photograph of actress Signe Auen in Photoplay magazine (Oct. 1915)
Signe Auen (Oct. 1915)

In 1915, there was an uptick in the number of babies named Signe according to the U.S. baby name data:

Girls named SignePeople named Signe (SSDI)
19185155
19175250
19164255
191567†73
19144570
19134676
19124392
†Peak usage

(I added data from the Social Security Death Index as well. For the SSDI numbers — which were declining during the 1910s, after peaking in the 1890s and 1900s — I only counted people who had Signe as a first name, not as a middle.)

Sometime during the last half of 1915 Signe Auen changed her name to “Seena Owen” — the phonetic spelling of her Danish name.

Photograph of actress Seena Owen in Photoplay magazine (Mar. 1916)
As “Seena Owen” (Mar. 1916)

And in 1917, the baby name Seena debuted in the U.S. baby name data:

Girls named SeenaPeople named Seena (SSDI)
1920.2
191964
1918.4
19175*4
1916.1
1915.2
1914.4
*Debut

Numbers from both the SSA and the SSDI show that usage of the name Seena, which has always been relatively low, was at its highest during the 1920s.

This matches up pretty well with Seena Owen’s film career, which lasted from the late 1910s until the early 1930s, when Owen retired from acting due to the advent of talkies.

Which name do you like more, Signe or Seena?

P.S. Did you know that Seena Owen was the first person to wear false eyelashes? Director David Llewelyn “D. W.” Griffith had a wig maker invent the first set of eyelash extensions for Owen to wear in his 1916 epic film Intolerance.

Sources: Seena Owen – Wikipedia, Signý – Behind the Name, SSA

The baby name Sedona

Sedona

The Arizona city of Sedona was named after the first postmaser’s wife — but only because all the other names he’d submitted to the U.S. Post Office Department got rejected.

The wife in question is Sedona Arabella Miller, born in Missouri in 1877. She pronounced her name “see-dona” and went by the nicknames Donie (as a kid) and Dona (as an adult).

Sedona was the only one in her family with an unusual name; her siblings included Lillie, Edna, Minnie, Noah, and Edward. Her mother said simply, “I liked the sound of it.” It is possible that she had heard the Creole name Sedonie, used among free women of color in the South.

[Sedonie is probably a variant of Sidonie, which is a French feminine form of the Latin name Sidonius, which means “of Sidon.” Sidon was an ancient Phoenician city-state.]

Sedona married Theodore Carlton “T.C.” Schnebly on her 20th birthday, and in 1901 she and T.C. moved to Arizona with their two young children.

Not long after they arrived, T.C. decided the settlement needed a post office, so he applied for a post office name. But all the names he sent in — Schnebly Station, Red Rock Crossing, Oak Creek Station — were rejected, as they were too long to fit on the cancellation stamp beside “Arizona Territory.”

Finally, at the suggestion of his brother, T.C. tried his wife’s name. The relatively short “Sedona” was approved. By mid-1902, T.C. had the Sedona post office up and running “in the back of the Schnebly home.”

*

So the baby name Sedona existed before the city did, but it’s never been popular enough to rank in the U.S. top 1,000.

Here’s how many U.S. babies have been named Sedona since the year 2000:

  • 2013: 38 baby girls named Sedona (7 in AZ)
  • 2012: 55 baby girls named Sedona (9 in AZ, 9 in CA)
  • 2011: 51 baby girls named Sedona (6 in AZ, 7 in CA)
  • 2010: 60 baby girls named Sedona (8 in AZ, 12 in CA)
  • 2009: 69 baby girls named Sedona (8 in AZ, 11 in CA)
  • 2008: 91 baby girls named Sedona (18 in AZ, 11 in CA)
  • 2007: 75 baby girls named Sedona (17 in AZ, 7 in CA)
  • 2006: 76 baby girls named Sedona (14 in AZ, 8 in CA)
  • 2005: 58 baby girls named Sedona (6 in AZ, 9 in CA)
  • 2004: 77 baby girls named Sedona (12 in AZ, 10 in CA)
  • 2003: 66 baby girls named Sedona (16 in AZ, 10 in CA)
  • 2002: 76 baby girls named Sedona (14 in AZ, 7 in CA)
  • 2001: 62 baby girls named Sedona (12 in AZ, 9 in CA)
  • 2000: 69 baby girls named Sedona (8 in AZ, 10 in CA)

Baby names that coincide with city names tend to be less popular among locals (i.e., Brooklyn and Madison are less popular among New Yorkers and Wisconsinites, respectively) but that’s not the case for Sedona.

Of the 923 baby girls named Sedona since the turn of the century, 155 (17%) were born in Arizona, making Arizona the state with the most Sedonas.

In second place is California with 120 Sedonas (13%). In third is Texas with 24 Sedonas (3%).

Arizona’s numbers are even more impressive when you consider that both California and Texas welcome several times as many babies as Arizona does per year.

Sources:

[This post was inspired by an Eponymia post about Arizona names.]