How popular is the baby name Sylvester 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 Sylvester.
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“Everly” is hot…”Beverly” is not. It’s a one-letter difference between fashionable and fusty.
If you’re sensitive to style, you’ll prefer Everly. It fits with today’s trends far better than Beverly does.
But if you’re someone who isn’t concerned about style, or prefers to go against style, then you may not automatically go for Everly. In fact, you may be more attracted to Beverly because it’s the choice that most modern parents would avoid.
If you’ve ever thought about intentionally giving your baby a dated name (like Debbie, Grover, Marcia, or Vernon) for the sake of uniqueness within his/her peer group — if you have no problem sacrificing style for distinctiveness — then this list is for you.
Years ago, the concept of “contrarian” baby names came up in the comments of a post about Lois. Ever since then, creating a collection of uncool/contrarian baby names has been on my to-do list.
Finally, last month, I experimented with various formulas for pulling unstylish baby names out of the SSA dataset. Keeping the great-grandparent rule in mind, I aimed for names that would have been fashionable among the grandparents of today’s babies. The names below are the best results I got.
Interestingly, thirteen of the names above — Bobbie, Cary, Dale, Jackie, Jimmie, Jody, Kerry, Kim, Lynn, Robin, Sandy, Tracey, Tracy — managed to make both lists.
Now some questions for you…
Do you like any of these names? Would you be willing to use any of them on a modern-day baby? Why or why not?
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 names
Top 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.
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 twins
Girl-boy twins
Boy-boy twins
Triplets
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).
I recently watched a YouTube video in which the speaker, who was German, offhandedly mentioned that New Year’s Eve is called “Silvester” in Germany.
I was intrigued by this little fact, so I set out to learn why.
Turns out Silvester (the holiday) takes its name from Pope Sylvester I, later known as St. Sylvester.
St. Sylvester died on December 31, 335, but his feast day (Dec. 31) wasn’t consistently the last day of the year until the Gregorian calendar was introduced in the late 1500s.
At that point, the name Sylvester became synonymous with New Year’s Eve — so much so that, today, people in Germany and several other countries (including Italy, France and Poland) simply call New Year’s Eve “Silvester” (or whatever the local variant of Silvester is).
What does the name Silvester mean? It comes from Latin and means “woody, sylvan, rural.” Silvester (with an i) is the original form; Sylvester (with a y) is a variant spelling used in English.
Vengeful Vietnam veteran John Rambo — the fictional character created by author David Morrell — was portrayed by Sylvester Stallone in the iconic ’80s movies First Blood (1982), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), and Rambo III (1988).
The cultural impact of the character was so great that “Rambo” is now a word you can find in the dictionary. One dictionary, for instance, defines the noun Rambo as “a fanatically militant or violently aggressive person.”
How many baby boys were named Rambo after the movies started coming out? Dozens, according to the U.S. baby name data:
1991: unlisted
1990: 6 baby boys named Rambo
1989: 6 baby boys named Rambo
1988: 9 baby boys named Rambo
1987: 7 baby boys named Rambo
1986: 13 baby boys named Rambo
1985: 18 baby boys named Rambo [peak]
1984: 5 baby boys named Rambo [debut]
1983: unlisted
1982: unlisted
How did writer David Morrell settle upon the surname “Rambo” for his tough-guy character? Strangely enough, the inspiration came from a piece of fruit:
In the early stages of composition, I struggled to find a strong name for the character. One afternoon while I was writing, my wife came home from a grocery store and said that she’d found a new kind of apple that she thought was delicious. Apples were the farthest thing from my mind while I struggled to find that character’s name, but politely I took a bite of the apple and discovered that it was in fact delicious. “What’s it called?” I asked. “Rambo,” she replied. This was in Pennsylvania, where the Rambo type of apple is grown and appreciated. Instantly, I recognized the sound of force. It also reminded me of the way some people pronounce the name of a French poet I’d been studying, Rimbaud, whose most famous work is A SEASON IN HELL, which I felt was an apt metaphor for the prisoner-of-war experiences that I imagined Rambo suffering.
The Rambo apple takes its name from 17th-century Swedish immigrant Peter Gunnarsson Rambo. His adopted surname “Rambo” might refer to Ramberget, the prominent hill on the Swedish island of Hisingen (where Peter was born).
The surname Rambo also has several other potential origins:
the French surname Rambeau, which can be derived from any of several personal names:
Rainbaut (Old French, made up of Germanic elements meaning “counsel” and “bold, brave”),
Hrambehrt (Germanic, “crow” and “bright”), or
Hrambald (Germanic, “crow” and “bold, brave”); or
the German surname Rambow, which can come from any of several place-names in northeastern Germany.
Oh, and here’s an interesting fact about the character’s first name: In Morrell’s original Rambo book, First Blood (1972), there was no first name. :) The scriptwriters are the ones who dubbed Rambo “John,” taking the name from the Civil War-era song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”
What are your thoughts on Rambo as a baby name?
Update, 5/2013: Rambo is back! The SSA just released the 2012 dataset, and it reveals that — after an absence of more than 20 years — Rambo is back in the data with 5 baby boys. For the current total number of Rambos, scroll to the bottom of the Rambo data table.
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