The names parents give and then stop giving

In 1897, one American boy in about 770 was named Dewey. In 1898 it was one in 118, and Dewey was the 19th most popular boys' name in the country. In 1899 it was one in 230. By 1908 it was one in 1,680, and it never came back. In 2017, the last full year of counts we hold, 28 American babies were named Dewey.

When we wrote about the names that disappeared, the story was Linda: a name that took about fifteen years to climb and longer than that to fall. This is the other kind. The names that went from everywhere to nowhere inside a decade.

Here is how we found them. We hold the American top 1,000 for every year from 1880 to 2008, as each name's share of the boys or girls born that year. We took every name that reached at least one baby in 200, which is 264 of them, and looked at what share it had left ten years after its best year. Linda kept 37% of its peak. The typical name in the study kept 63%. These are the ones that kept the least.

The fourteen fastest falls

“One baby in” is one boy or one girl in that many, in the peak year. “Kept” is the share ten years later as a percentage of the share at the peak, so Dewey at 7% means it had lost 93% of its share in ten years. The boy or girl label is the one in the official file, not ours.

Two things stand out. Nine of the fourteen are girls' names, and the study is only 159 girls' names to 105 boys'. And two of the five boys' names come from the 1880s and 1890s, before any of the girls' names on the list were even in fashion. Grover went from one boy in 900 in 1883 to one in 151 by 1885, and was down to one in 290 the year after. Dewey did the same thing thirteen years later, faster. We hold no explanation for either in the data, so we are not going to offer one. What we can say is that a name can jump into the top 20 in a single year, and that when it does, it tends not to stay.

The shape of a collapse

Put the falls on top of each other, starting each one at its own peak, and you can see there is more than one way to lose a name.

Dewey and Chelsea fall straight off the peak. Chelsea was the 15th most popular girls' name in America in 1992, one girl in 124. In 1993 it had lost 29% of that, in 1994 it had lost half, and by 2002 it was at 11% of where it started. It never had a plateau. The year it was biggest was also the year it started to go.

Brittany and Tammy are different. They hold for a year or two and then slide. Brittany was the third most popular girls' name in the country in 1989, one girl in 53. Ten years later it had 22% of that. By 2008 it had 2%. In 2017 it was given to 400 babies, and it is 928th in America now. Tammy was 8th in 1968 and held above one girl in a hundred for three more years before it went.

And then there is Linda, which reached one girl in 18 in 1948. Only Mary, in the 1880s, has ever had a bigger share of the file. It fell too. It just did it more slowly, and from much higher up.

It is getting faster

Split the 264 names by when they peaked and something shows up that we did not go looking for.

A big name that peaked before the First World War typically still had 82% of its share ten years on. Only four of the 60 lost half. A big name that peaked in the 1950s or 1960s typically kept 52%, and 30 of the 62 lost half or more. Dewey and Grover are the exceptions of their era. Debbie and Kathy are what their era did.

One thing to check before believing that. A name that slipped out of the top 1,000 is counted at the 1,000th name's share for that year, which is under one baby in 7,000 in every year of the file. Against a peak of one in 200 or better, that cannot move any of these figures by more than a point. So the change is real. Parents in the 1950s dropped their big names faster than parents in the 1890s did, and parents in the 1980s were not far behind.

It is happening now

The series above stops in 2008, but we also hold every name's American rank for each year from 2015 to 2025. So we can check whether anything is doing a Chelsea right now. Something is.

Alexa was the 32nd most popular girls' name in America in 2015. In 2017, when it was 66th, it was given to 3,888 babies. In 2020 it was 229th. In 2024 it was 806th. In 2025 it is not in the top 1,000 at all. No other name that was in the top 200 in 2015 has fallen anything like as far. You can probably work out why. The file cannot, so we will stick to what it says.

Alexa's US rank, 2015 to 2024. In 2025 it fell outside the top 1,000, so there is no rank to plot. Source: US Social Security Administration.

The next biggest falls from the 2015 top 200 are slower, and they look like ordinary fashion rather than a cliff. Aubree went from 79th to 489th, Taylor from 77th to 403rd, and Alyssa from 93rd to 453rd. Those are the Tammys. Alexa is the Dewey.

A warning about nicknames

Look back at the table and you will see Debbie, Kathy and Mike on it, and Steve and Ricky not far below. Those are nicknames put on the birth certificate as the name itself. So we checked each one against the full name it came from, over the same ten years after each one's own peak.

Every pair goes the same way. Michael kept 81% of its peak share ten years on. Mike kept 23%. Steven kept 82%, Steve 33%. The full name is a name. The short form is a fashion, and it goes when the fashion goes.

We mention this because of what we found in the names rising in Britain. The fastest growing boys' names in England and Wales right now include Vinnie and Dougie, nicknames on the birth certificate. The American file says that kind of name climbs fast and falls faster. It said it about Debbie in 1959 and Mike in 1960. We are not going to tell you it is wrong about Vinnie. We are going to tell you what happened last time.