Mother's Day weekend is always pretty exciting for me. My mom is awesome, but I am pretty equally excited about her all the time. No, the reason I get so excited about Mother's Day weekend is that the Social Security Administration releases the top 1000 most popular names for the previous year. Last Friday they released 2009's. I'll probably have at least a couple of posts about names. Readers, please let me know if there's anything you'd like me to analyze!
Clearly, the news broke into the regular media that Isabella is the new #1 girls' name, ending a 13-year run by Emily and Emma. But while the media is making a big deal that Isabella and Jacob -- names of main characters in the Twilight series -- are ranked #1, I don't think too much of that. Jacob has been #1 since 1999, and Isabella has been flying up the charts since 1990. When Twilight was released in 2005, both names were already super-popular. The name recognition from Twilight may have given Isabella a boost, but it was popular anyway.
What the SSA data doesn't tell, though, is some other big news: Jacob is actually the #3 most popular name for boys. You see, the SSA doesn't combine alternate spellings of names. It does, however, tell the number of babies named each name, which can then be combined and ranked. When you do that, as I have, you discover the two actual most popular names for boys born in 2009: Aiden and Jayden. On the SSA list, Aiden is ranked #12 and Jayden #8. The reason Aiden and Jayden don't show up as #1 and #2?
There were 15,846 baby boys named Aiden in 2009. But Aiden can also be spelled Aidan (#72), Ayden (#85), Aden (#253), Aaden (#271), Aydan (#622), Aydin (#646), Aidyn (#724), and Aedan (#838). And some boys named Adan (#293) certainly also will pronounce their names like Aiden, though others are the Spanish Adán (accents don't show up on the SSA list). Add those all together, and you get 30,518 little Aiden-variants (not even including the 1117 Adans, because who knows how their names are pronounced). That's DOUBLE the Aidens! On the other hand, the alternate spellings of Jacob on the list (Jakob and Jaycob) add only 1179 babies to the 20,878 Jacobs.
Americans' propensity to play with spelling creates a lot of false data like this. Names like Aiden and Jayden that follow a certain pattern are immensely popular (on the girls' side, Hailey and Kaylee are the highest ranking names for this pattern). Parents can pretty much create a name using this formula:
[K, C, J, H, Br, R, Z, Sh] + [long A] + [L or D] + [-en, -ee, -a]
And then change the spelling to suit one's fancy.
The possibilities are finite, of course, but they seem endless: Braylen, Jayla, Hayleigh, Shaylee, Braedon, Raelyn, Cailyn, Zaiden, Shayla, Jaelyn, Raiden... all of those are in the top 1000.
3 comments:
I love you. Isabella and Jacob's recent popularity probably influenced Stephenie Meyer more than Twilight influenced babies.
Here's the real question, though--what about "Renesmee"? Barf.
meredith, my thoughts exactly. right down to the barf.
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