Daisy is back, Karen is not: the hundred-year rule, tested

You will have heard the hundred-year rule. A name is popular, then it belongs to somebody's mum, then to somebody's nan, and then, about a hundred years after its first run, it sounds fresh again and comes back. It is repeated on every baby name site. We hold the American top 100 for every year from 1880, so we can test it.

Take the 100 commonest girls' names in America today and ask how many of them were in the top 100 of each earlier year. In 1880 the answer is 21. In 1925, where the rule says the revival should be coming from, it is 17. In 1958 it is two: Elizabeth and Maria. Every other name in the 1958 top 100 has gone, and 61 of them are not in the top 1,000 at all. Susan, Karen, Patricia, Debra, Donna and Cynthia were all top ten that year. Today's list looks more like 1880 than like any year from 1909 to 1999.

The names that have come back were out for about 80 years, not a hundred. Arthur left the American top 100 in 1969 and returned this year, after 55. August left in 1891 and returned in 2024, after 132. And the rule only works one way so far: the names of the 1880s are back, the names of the 1950s are not.

How we counted

The top 100 is the top 100 as the files rank it: the American Social Security Administration's rankings for 2025, and for England and Wales the Office for National Statistics file for 2025. For every year from 1880 to 2008 we have the American top 1,000 of each sex and each name's share of births, which ranks them; for 2015 to 2024 we have the published rankings. For each of those years we count how many of today's 100 names were in that year's 100. Boys and girls are counted from their own lists. We do not hold 2009 to 2014, so a name that came back in those years shows up as back “by 2015”. There is no hand list and no judgement about which names are old-fashioned. A name is in a year's top 100 or it is not.

Two names from 1958

The chart below is the whole finding. For girls, the line starts at 21 names shared with 1880 and stays between 18 and 21 for every year to 1908. Then it falls: 17 in 1925, 11 in 1940, six in 1943, three in 1957 and two from 1958 to 1961. It stays at four or below until 1972, and does not get back to 1880's 21 until 2000. So if you were born in America in the late 1950s, the names of your class are the names nobody gives now. Of the 1958 top 100, 39 are still somewhere in the top 1,000 and two are in the top 100. Of the 1880 top 100, 66 are in the top 1,000 and 21 are in the top 100. An 1880 name is more likely to be in use today than a 1958 one.

Here are the two top tens side by side. The 1958 one is a list of names that have left; the 1880 one is half gone and half back.

Elizabeth is the one name on every list: 4th in 1880, 10th in 1925, 22nd in 1958, 17th now, never below 26th in any year we hold. Maria was 66th in 1958 and is 87th. The 1925 list does a little better than 1958 but no better than 1880: 17 of its names are back, led by Evelyn, 12th then and 8th now, Eleanor 31st then and 12th now, and Hazel 45th then and 21st now. Its top ten was Mary, Dorothy, Betty, Helen, Margaret, Ruth, Virginia, Doris, Mildred and Elizabeth, and of those only Elizabeth is in the top 100 today; Betty, Doris and Mildred are out of the top 1,000.

Eighty years out, not a hundred

Now the rule itself. Of the 100 girls' names in America's top 100 today, 27 had been in the top 100 before, dropped out of it for twenty years or more, and came back. The table has all of them. The longest absence is Amelia, which left the top 100 in 1887 and returned in 2004, 116 years later, having fallen to 489th in 1968; it is 4th now and 3rd in England and Wales. Lydia and Daisy were out for 115 years, Georgia for 111 and came back this year at 99th, Nora for 109, Hannah for 105, Sadie for 104, Caroline for exactly 100. The shortest is Evelyn, 48 years. The middle of the 27 is 78 years. Take only the 15 that have come back since 2015 and the middle is 88.

Boys have 13 such names, and they were out for less time: the middle is 62 years. August is the record, 132 years, from 1891 to 2024; it was 926th in 1983. Oliver left in 1903 and was back by 2015, 111 years, and is 3rd now. Isaac 98 years, Everett 94, Leo 77, Theodore 62. At the short end, Henry was out for 36 years, Jack for 31 and Wesley for 29.

Put the 22 names that have returned since 2015 together, boys and girls, and the middle absence is 79 years. So the hundred-year rule is roughly right about the gap, a bit long, and the names it is bringing back now are, more than anything, the names of the 1880s and 1890s: eleven of the 22 left the top 100 before 1930, seven of them before 1915. A few come from the 1940s and 1950s: Alice left in 1956 and was back by 2015, Charlotte left in 1952 and is 2nd. Nothing that was in the 1958 top 100 has gone away for twenty years and come back. The data cannot say that Karen will never return. It can say that every name returning now left the top 100 before 1990, and that none of them is from the 1958 list.

This is new

The bounce back to 1880 has not always been there. Run the same count from an earlier year and the resemblance just fades with distance. The girls' top 100 of 1960 shared 70 names with 1950, 37 with 1930, 22 with 1920 and 14 with 1880, and no year in between was lower than 1880. The 1980 list is the first one that looks more like 1880 than like some year in between: 14 names with 1880, nine with 1917. By 2000 the low had moved to 1935 (eight names, against 16 with 1880), by 2008 to 1954 (five, against 15), and now it sits at 1958 (two, against 21). The dead zone has been moving forward at about a year a year, and the old end of the list has been coming back a little more each decade.

Another way to see it: of today's 100 girls' names, 30 were in a top 100 before 1931. Only three first reached a top 100 between 1931 and 1980 and are still there: Victoria, Leah and Natalie. Then 25 arrived between 1981 and 2008 and 42 are first seen in 2015 or later. Fifty years of American girls' names have left three survivors in the top 100.

The boys never left

The boys' line on the chart never goes below 16. In 1945 to 1948, its lowest point, sixteen of today's top 100 boys' names were in the top 100: James, William, John, Michael, Robert, David, Joseph, Thomas, Charles, Daniel, Samuel, Andrew, Anthony, Henry, Jack and Arthur. Those are the names that keep every decade's list in touch with every other, and they are the reason the boys' version of the hundred-year rule is undramatic. The 1960 boys' top ten were David, Michael, James, John, Robert, Mark, William, Richard, Thomas and Steven, and every one of them is still in the top 300. The 1960 names that have gone are the short forms: Gary, Larry, Randy, Terry, Mike, Steve, Jeff, Billy, Bobby, 29 in all, against 61 of the 1958 girls.

Of today's 100 boys' names, 25 were in a top 100 before 1931 and 14 first reached one between 1931 and 1980: Matthew, Christopher, Joshua, Ryan, Lucas, Nathan, Jonathan and the rest. Boys' names of the mid-century kept a foothold; girls' names did not.

England and Wales: 1880 again

We hold two British years, so Britain has no hundred-year line of its own. What we can do is set the England and Wales top 100 of 2025 against the American top 100 of every year, and it draws the same shape, lower. The British girls' list shares 23 names with America's 1880 top 100, as many as with any year, and three with America's 1967 to 1970 lists: Elizabeth, Nancy and Maria. It shares 11 with America's 2000 and 50 with America's 2025. The British boys' list shares 30 with 1880, 14 with 1970 and 42 with America today.

The difference is that Britain has brought back 1880 names America has not. Florence is 5th here and 391st in America. Elsie 8th and 123rd. Mabel 16th and 201st. Lottie 31st and 528th. Ada 40th and 219th. Olive 47th and 197th. Harriet 59th here and outside the American top 1,000. For boys, George is 7th here and 126th there, Oscar 8th and 223rd, Archie 11th and 301st, Harry 19th and 775th, Edward 31st and 224th, Frederick 52nd and 435th, Albert 57th and 614th, Alfred 76th and 840th. All of those were in America's 1880 top 100. Arthur, 5th here, got back into the American top 100 this year at 87th, the first of that group to do it. Going the other way, 31 of Britain's top 100 boys' names and 31 of the girls' have never been in any American top 100 we hold: Freddie, Alfie, Arlo, Rory; Freya, Poppy, Phoebe, Matilda.

What we cannot tell you

Why, and what happens next. The files hold what parents chose, not why, so we cannot say whether the 1880 names came back because they sounded fresh, because of who had them, or for no reason that will ever be measured. We cannot say that Karen, Susan and Linda will not return; the names that have returned took 48 to 132 years, and half of the 1958 names had left the top 100 by 1974, so by the pattern their turn is not yet due. We do not hold 2009 to 2014, which blurs the return year for the names first seen back in 2015. The top-100 line is a line: a name at 101st counts as out. And the long series holds only the top 1,000 names, so “out of the top 1,000” means the name is below the 1,000th place, not that nobody has it. Britain's own history is not here, because we hold two British years.

What it means for you

If you want a name that was your great-grandmother's and is back, you are spoilt for choice, and the ones furthest along are already big: Amelia, Charlotte, Evelyn, Eleanor, Violet, Nora, Hazel, Lucy, Ella. The ones still climbing are the 1880 names that got back into the top 100 last year or this: Daisy, Georgia, August, Arthur. If you want a name that was your grandmother's, from the 1950s, you will have it almost to yourself: of the 100 commonest girls' names of 1958, 61 are given to so few babies that they do not make the top 1,000. For a boy, the rule barely applies. The classics never left, and what has gone from 1960 is Gary, Larry and the short forms, which is a different story and one we have written.