Grace, Hope, Destiny: the girls named after virtues

In 2017, 4,241 American girls were named Genesis. In England and Wales in 2025, seventeen were. Per girl born, that makes Genesis 37 times as common in America. Serenity is 15 times as common there, Trinity nine times and Destiny five times.

Britain has virtue names too. It just has different ones. Grace is 27th here and went to 1,309 girls. Then Felicity, Hope, Faith and Verity. Old words, most of them names since before 1920. America kept Grace and added a set of words that nobody had used as a first name before the 1970s. Add them all up and one American girl in 47 has a virtue name. Here it is one in 86.

How we counted

A virtue name is a first name spelled exactly as an everyday English word for a quality, a feeling, an idea or a blessing. Grace, Hope, Faith, Joy, Mercy, Destiny, Serenity, Harmony, Miracle, Legend. The full list of 104 words is in the page's own notes, so you can check it. Titles and people are out: Angel, Princess, King, Saint. So are places like Eden and Zion, things like Rose and Pearl, and respellings like Journee. Nevaeh is out because it is not a word, although 3,562 American girls got it in 2017 and 362 girls here in 2025.

Boys and girls are counted 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 are from 2025.

Britain: Grace, and then a long gap

The Office for National Statistics counted 253,281 girls born in England and Wales in 2025. 2,951 of them got one of 53 virtue names, 1.2%, one girl in 86. Grace is 44% of them on her own. Nothing else is in the top 100. Felicity is 152nd with 330 girls, Hope 180th with 276, Faith 281st with 162, Verity 436th with 92. Then Harmony with 74, Joy with 73 and Reign with 50, and that is every virtue name given to 50 or more girls here last year.

The American favourites are all here, and all small. Serenity went to 34 girls, Heaven and Trinity to 29 each, Genesis to 17 and Journey to 7. In 2024 the share was 1.2% too, so this is not one odd year.

America: one girl in 93, then one in 415, then one in 46

The American records run from 1880, and in 1880 the virtue names were Grace. One girl in 93 had a virtue name that year and almost every one of them was a Grace, the 19th most popular girls' name in the country. Charity and Prudence were the next two, and they were tiny. Grace was 13th in 1890, given to more than one girl in 90.

Then it fell for eighty years. Grace was 62nd in 1930, 183rd in 1950 and 363rd in 1972, one girl in 2,667. By 1949 Joy had passed it, and Joy led the virtue names for the next 37 years without ever getting above 109th. The low point for the whole group was 1969. One American girl in 415.

What happened next is the finding. Destiny entered the American top 1,000 in 1975, and by 1993 it was the biggest virtue name in the country, ahead of Grace. It peaked in 2000 at 24th, one girl in 203. Grace came back at the same time, from 140th in 1990 to 19th in 2000 and 13th in 2003. Faith was 50th in 2003. Trinity arrived in 1974, was in the top 100 by 2000 and reached 48th in 2004. By 2001 one American girl in 46 had a virtue name, more than at any point since the records began. That is a nine-fold rise in 32 years.

The full American files, which count every name given to five or more babies, put the peak in 2005, when one girl in 40 had a virtue name. In 2017 it was one in 47: 36,585 girls, led by Grace with 6,991, Genesis 4,241, Serenity 3,537, Faith 2,597 and Trinity 1,846. The one in 46 of 2001 is a floor, because it only counts the top 1,000 names, so the two figures agree.

Old words and new words

Here is the difference between the two countries in one number. Take every girl with a virtue name and ask whether her word was already an American first name before 1920, meaning it was in the top 1,000 for either sex in some year before then. Grace, Hope, Faith, Joy, Charity, Mercy, Patience and Prudence all were. Destiny, Serenity, Trinity, Genesis, Harmony, Heaven, Journey and Miracle were not. None of them reached the top 1,000 before 1974.

In England and Wales two girls in three with a virtue name have an old word. In America it is fewer than one in two, and it has been falling: 57% in 1990, 49% in 2000, 42% in 2010, 43% in 2017. The one wrinkle is Felicity, which counts as new by this rule because it only entered the American top 1,000 in 1998. Call it old, since it is an old English word and Britain's second virtue name, and Britain's share of new words falls to 23%.

America is coming back down

Since 2017 we only have American rankings, and they point one way. In 2015 four virtue names were in America's top 100 for girls: Grace at 19th, Genesis, Serenity and Faith. In 2025 it is two, Grace at 38th and Genesis at 66th. Serenity has gone from 71st to 129th, Faith from 91st to 254th, Trinity from 129th to 428th and Destiny from 186th to 635th. Haven is the exception, up from 329th to 190th. Genesis has not moved at all.

Grace is slipping in both countries. It was 19th in America in 2015 and 38th now. It was 25th in England and Wales in 2024 and 27th in 2025, from 1,390 girls to 1,309. One year is not a trend here, so we will only say that the American line has been pointing down for a decade.

Boys hardly get them, except Legend

374 boys in England and Wales got a virtue name in 2025, one in 732. Reign went to 114 of them and Sunny to 69, and nothing else reached 50. In America it is one boy in 300, and the biggest is Legend: 1,448 boys in 2017, and 193rd in 2025, up from 392nd in 2015. Six boys here got it. Chance had 1,332 American boys and 14 here, Royal 569 and 12, Justice 479 and under three, Sincere 477 and under three. The old boys' virtue words were Royal, Noble and Loyal, all in the American top 1,000 in the 1890s. Loyal left it in 1948, Noble in 1954 and Royal in 1971.

Reign is the one name on the list that both sexes get in both countries. 114 boys and 50 girls here, 215 boys and 407 girls there.

The names Britain owns

Verity is the clearest case. 92 girls here in 2025, 72 American girls in 2017, which per girl born makes it nearly nine times as common here. Felicity is 2.4 times as common here, Hope 1.5 times and Grace 1.3 times. That is the whole British list. Every other virtue name with any size to it is commoner in America, and the new words are commoner there by a mile.

What it means for you

If you want a virtue name in Britain, Grace is the crowd and everything else is quiet. Hope, Faith and Felicity are all outside the top 150 here, and Verity, Joy and Mercy are rarer still. The American words are rarer again. Serenity, Heaven and Trinity went to about 30 girls each in the whole of England and Wales, and if you like the sound of them, the figures say you will not meet another one at nursery. Whether the American wave reaches here, we cannot tell you. It has not so far.