Pearl, Crystal, Ruby: the girls named after jewels

In 1982 Crystal was the ninth most popular girls' name in America. One girl in 95 got it. Add Amber at 18th and the smaller jewels and one American girl in 51 was named after a gemstone that year, the most in the records. In England and Wales in 2025, Crystal went to 23 girls.

Britain has a jewel name too. It is Ruby, 38th here, given to 1,032 girls last year, and twice as common per girl born as in America. Ruby is the one that America was giving its daughters a hundred years ago. That is the pattern in this article: every generation of American parents has picked a different stone, and Britain has gone back to the first ones.

How we counted

A jewel name is a first name spelled exactly as the English word for a gemstone or a jewel. Nineteen words: Amber, Amethyst, Beryl, Coral, Crystal, Diamond, Emerald, Garnet, Ivory, Jade, Jasper, Jet, Jewel, Onyx, Opal, Pearl, Ruby, Sapphire and Topaz, which nobody in either country used. Respellings are out, so Krystal, Jewell and Jayde are not counted. Nor are the same words in other languages (Perla, Esmeralda, Gemma), or metals (Goldie, Sterling). Jasmine is a flower, and we counted it in the article on flower names. Boys and girls come from their own lists in the official files, never from our own gender label.

The American counts are from 2017, the newest full count we hold, and the American rankings run to 2025. The long American series, from 1880 to 2008, covers the top 1,000 names each year, so every figure from it is a floor.

Five jewels in 129 years

In 1880 the jewel name was Pearl. 47th in the country, and 82% of all the girls with a jewel name. Ruby was 149th. Pearl climbed to 24th in 1889 and stayed within a few places of it through the 1890s, when one American girl in 116 was a Pearl. Then Ruby came up behind it, from 149th to 51st by 1900, and passed it in 1907. Ruby's best year was 1911: 22nd, one girl in 131, with Opal 81st and Pearl 48th. Between them, one American girl in 60 had a jewel name in 1905, the top of the first wave.

Then nothing, for fifty years. Ruby was 66th in 1940 and 179th in 1956. Pearl was 421st. Opal had almost gone. In 1956 one girl in 510 got a jewel name, the lowest point in the records, more than eight times fewer than in 1905.

Crystal had been in the top 1,000 every year since 1890 and had never got near the top of it. It was 484th in 1948. It passed Ruby in 1959, was 101st in 1970, 43rd in 1975, 18th in 1978 and ninth in 1982. Amber followed three years behind, 59th in 1975 and 22nd in 1980, and passed Crystal in 1985 to peak at 13th in 1986, one girl in 109. Jade arrived in the top 1,000 in 1977 and reached 86th in 2002, and passed Amber in 2006. By 2008 both of the big 1980s names had fallen a long way, Crystal to 252nd and Amber to 165th, and the name back on top of the group was Ruby, at 113th. Pearl had left the top 1,000 in 1982.

So the leader has changed hands five times. Pearl to 1906, Ruby from 1907 to 1958, Crystal from 1959 to 1984, Amber from 1985 to 2005, Jade for two years, and Ruby again from 2008. The full American files, which count every name given to five or more babies, agree: Ruby was the biggest jewel name in 2008, 2010 and 2017, with Jade second each time. In 2017 the two of them were 61% of the 10,208 American girls with a jewel name.

The waves are big. One girl in 68 in the 1990 full file, one in 111 in 2000, one in 185 in 2010, one in 168 in 2017. Nothing in the data says why parents in 1905 wanted Pearl and Ruby and parents in 1982 wanted Crystal and Amber, and we will not guess. What the files do show is that each generation left its stone behind. Crystal dropped out of the American top 1,000 in 2022, forty years after being ninth. Jewel went in 2020. Amber is 520th.

Britain picked the old ones

The Office for National Statistics counted 253,281 girls born in England and Wales in 2025. 1,795 of them got one of 14 jewel names, 0.7%, one girl in 141. That is a touch more than America's one in 168, and the list is in a different order. Ruby is 57% of it on her own. Then Amber with 302 girls, Pearl with 180, Opal with 63, Sapphire with 60 and Jade with 49. Everything else is under 25.

Put the two countries side by side per girl born and the split is clean. Pearl is 2.7 times as common here as in America, Amber 2.6 times, Sapphire 2.3, Ruby 2.0 and Opal 1.3. Going the other way, Jade is 8.2 times as common in America, Ivory 6.2, Jewel 4.1, Crystal 2.9, Diamond 2.4 and Emerald 2.0. With one exception, Britain's jewels are the ones America wore first and put down: Pearl, Ruby and Opal, the three names of the 1905 wave. America's are the ones it took up after 1960. The exception is Amber, which is a 1980s American name that Britain still uses more.

Two things we cannot tell you. We hold only two years of the ONS file, so we do not know whether Britain had a Pearl generation and a Ruby generation of its own; the American records say America did. And one year is not a trend. Jewel names fell 7.7% here from 2024 to 2025 against a 1.8% fall in girls born, and nearly all of that was Amber, from 399 girls to 302. Ruby went up, from 1,020 to 1,032.

Is Ruby coming back in America too?

Yes, slowly. Ruby was 401st among American girls in 1986, its lowest year ever. It was 113th in 2008, 83rd in 2015 and is 64th in 2025. Opal, which was out of the top 1,000 until 2017, is 423rd. Pearl is not following: 624th in 2015, 777th now. The jewel name climbing fastest in America is Ivory, 721st in 2015 and 378th in 2025, a name 11 girls got here. Jade sits at 95th, down from 81st in 2023. Two jewel names are in America's top 100 for girls, Ruby and Jade. In 2015 it was Ruby alone.

Boys get one jewel, and it is Jasper

855 boys in England and Wales got a jewel name in 2025, one in 320. 802 of them were Jasper, 63rd, up from 71st and 739 boys in 2024. Then Onyx with 31, and nothing else above ten. In America it is one boy in 720, and again Jasper is nearly all of it: 2,083 boys in 2017, 129th in 2025, up from 214th in 2015. Per boy born Jasper is 2.6 times as common here.

Jasper is the one jewel name that was never new. It was 139th for American boys in 1880, one boy in 1,208, and it fell every decade for ninety years to 813th in 1970. It has climbed every decade since. Onyx is the newcomer: not in the American top 1,000 until 2018, and 365th in 2025. And in the 1880s Pearl was a boys' name as well as a girls' one, 182nd for boys in 1886. The last year it made the boys' top 1,000 was 1939.

What it means for you

If you want a jewel name in Britain, Ruby is the crowd. One girl in 245 born here last year is a Ruby, and she will probably not be the only one in her year at school. Amber and Pearl are both outside the top 150 and both fell last year. Opal and Sapphire went to about 60 girls each in the whole of England and Wales. Jade, the second biggest jewel name in America, went to 49 girls here. Crystal, which one American girl in 95 was given in 1982, went to 23. If the American pattern holds, and we cannot promise it will, the next jewel name is not the one that is big now.