The names that disappeared

In 1947, 99,686 American babies were named Linda. That is about one girl in every twenty born that year. Not one in twenty in a school, or in a town. One in twenty in the entire country.

Seventy years later, in 2017, the number was 404.

That is not a name going out of fashion. That is a name falling off a cliff, and Linda is not even unusual. Once you start looking, an entire generation of names has quietly vanished from the maternity ward.

What happened to Linda

Here is the whole story in one line. It is Linda's share of American girls, every five years, from 1880 onwards.

For sixty years Linda sits flat along the bottom, given to a few hundred babies a year. Then in the space of about fifteen years it climbs roughly a hundredfold, peaks, and falls almost as fast as it rose. By 2008 it is nearly back where it started.

The usual explanation is a song. Jack Lawrence wrote “Linda” in 1942 for the one year old daughter of his lawyer, a girl called Linda Eastman who grew up to be Linda McCartney. It was published in 1946 and the Ray Noble version with Buddy Clark on vocals got to number two on the Billboard chart in 1947, the exact year Linda peaked.

It is a lovely story and the timing is perfect. The data says it is not the whole answer. Look at the chart again. Linda was already climbing steeply before the song came out, going from roughly one girl in 900 in 1935 to one in 64 by 1940. Whatever started it was already well underway by the time anyone was singing about it. The song lands on the peak, not on the beginning.

We would rather say that than pretend to know. It is the same rule we apply to etymologies on this site. If the evidence only supports “these two things happened at the same time”, then that is what it says.

It happened to a whole generation

Linda is the most dramatic case but it is not a special one. These are the names that fell furthest, comparing the year each was given to the most American babies against the most recent full year of records.

Every one of those is a fall of more than 98%. Debra is the steepest of the lot. It went from 50,555 babies in 1955 to 44 in 2017, which is 99.9% gone. In England and Wales last year there were four.

Read the peak years and you can see what is really going on. They cluster tightly, from the mid 1930s to the mid 1960s. These are not thirteen separate stories. This is one generation of parents, choosing from one pool of names, and that pool emptying out together as their children grew up and had children of their own who wanted something that did not sound like their mother.

Britain is quietly bringing some of them back

Here is the bit that surprised us. We hold both the American figures and the Office for National Statistics figures for England and Wales, so we can check whether a name that died in one country died in both. Mostly it did. But not always.

Nancy was given to 32,442 American babies in 1947 and 308 in 2017, so on that side of the Atlantic it is finished. In England and Wales in 2025 it went to 604 babies, which makes it the 78th most popular girls' name in the country. Nancy is not a historical curiosity in Britain. Nancy is a name you meet at the school gates.

Dorothy is the same shape, 253 babies and 199th in England and Wales. Betty is at 108. And two of the names in that table above are actually climbing here: Deborah rose 128 places in the English and Welsh rankings last year, and Lisa rose 134.

A word of caution on that last point, because it is the sort of number that is easy to get wrong. The ONS ranks every name down to three babies, so a name given to a handful of children can appear to leap a thousand places when two more parents pick it. We only count movement for names given to at least fifty babies, which both Deborah and Lisa clear. Linda and Barbara do not, so we are not going to tell you what their rankings did. The honest answer is that the numbers are too small to say.

So will they come back?

Some of them already have. Look at the names doing well right now and you will find Henry, which peaked in 1921 and is currently 5th in America. Evelyn peaked in 1921 and is 8th. Eleanor peaked in 1920 and is 12th. Hazel, Alice, Clara, Arthur, all back in the top hundred after a century away.

Notice the dates though. The names coming back peaked around a hundred years ago, not fifty. There seems to be a waiting period, and it is roughly long enough that nobody choosing the name has met anyone who had it first. A name has to stop belonging to your mother before it can belong to your daughter.

Which puts Linda, Debra, Susan and Tammy somewhere around the 2040s. Gary and Larry too. You heard it here first!