How popular is the baby name Ray 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 Ray.
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In October of 1975 — while Roland Martin was competing in a bass fishing tournament in Tulsa, Oklahoma — his wife was MaryAnn went into labor.
As soon as he was off the water, Roland rushed to the hospital. His wife gave birth to a baby boy.
Not long after that, Roland was on the phone with his friend Ray Scott, founder of the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society (B.A.S.S.).
Ray asked what they were going to name the newborn. Roland said they hadn’t chosen a name yet.
So Ray said, “If you name him after me I’ll give him a B.A.S.S. Lifetime Membership.” Dad liked that idea and ran in to tell my mom. He was all excited about the Life Membership.
My mom’s reaction was, “No way. I’m not going to name him Ray. I don’t really like that name, and he doesn’t look like a Ray.”
So, Dad thought about that and said, “How about Scott?” Mom said, “Well I might be able to work with that.”
Scott Martin thinks he “might be the only person to get a B.A.S.S. Lifetime Membership at birth.”
The baby name Wrayanne was a one-hit wonder in the U.S. baby name data in the late 1940s:
1950: unlisted
1949: unlisted
1948: 5 baby girls named Wrayanne [debut]
1947: unlisted
1946: unlisted
What was the source?
A girl in a bathing suit!
A photo of 17-year-old Wrayanne Teeple ran in newspapers nationwide in September of 1948. The caption revealed that Wrayanne would be one of about 50 girls posing for amateur photographers at the sixth annual Beach Girl-Amateur Photographer Contest in Long Beach, California. (She didn’t end up winning.)
Her name (sometimes misspelled Rayanne) was also mentioned in local California papers later that year, when she was selected as the “princess” of the Long Beach float in the Tournament of Roses Parade, which was held on the first day of 1949.
Wrayanne’s name was likely coined as a combination of her parents’ names, Ray and Georgiana.
The name Kanye debuted in the SSA’s baby name data in 2002. It saw peak usage just two years later, in 2004:
2007: 53 boys named Kanye
2006: 101 boys named Kanye
2005: 202 boys (and 5 girls) named Kanye [rank: 893rd]
2004: 509 boys (and 19 girls) named Kanye [rank: 486th]
2003: 87 boys named Kanye
2002: 5 boys named Kanye
2001: unlisted
Also in 2004, the similar names Kanyae, Jakanye and Dekanye debuted, and the name Kanya popped up for the first time as a boy name.
The influence, of course, was rapper/producer Kanye (pronounced kahn-yay) West.
His successful debut album, The College Dropout (2004), is what boosted the name to peak usage. Even before that, though, he was becoming famous as an in-house producer for Roc-A-Fella Records. He worked on Jay-Z’s 2001 album The Blueprint, for instance.
How did he come to have the name “Kanye”? Here’s what his late mother Donda West wrote in her 2007 book Raising Kanye:
Only one thing was missing — the perfect name for the perfect baby. With all of the excitement around the pregnancy, we’d never picked out names. So my mother and I began thumbing through this book of African names I’d bought. I was very Afrocentric and so was Ray. We wanted our child to have a name that represented his culture and stood for something. We wanted him to have a strong name.
Mother and I found the name “Kanye” in this book. It was an Ethiopian name that meant “the only one.” I knew he would be our only child, set apart, and special.
My mother found his middle name in the Os. She chose “Omari,” which means “wise man.” Kanye Omari West. Mother pointed out that his initials would be K.O. She liked that it stood for knockout. We asked Ray about the names and he was cool with both Kanye for the first name and Omari as the middle name. So we made it official.
(I haven’t been able to confirm this particular origin/meaning of Kanye — or even figure out which name-book Donda was using — but I can tell you that there’s a village in Botswana called Kanye, which is interesting.)
What are your thoughts on the name Kanye? Would you considering using it?
Looking for a pair of baby names that are mirror images of one another? If so, check out this long list of palindromic name pairings.
What’s a palindrome? It’s a word or phrase that can be read the same way in either direction, i.e., both forwards and backwards. For instance, the words “level,” “refer” and “pop” are all palindromes.
Each of the hundreds of pairings below features two names that contain the same sequence of letters, just written in opposite directions. (Nearly all of these names were collected from the SSA’s huge database of U.S. baby names.)
It’s also possible to come up with your own palindromic pairs by flipping traditional names to create brand new names, just as Ramon and Helen were flipped to create the modern names Nomar and Neleh.
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