The most popular baby names of the 1910s are also perfect for modern babies

Posted in Baby Names.

Posted on July 20, 2018September 2, 2021 by Pip Lincolne

You might think that names plucked from over 100 years ago would be stuffy and outdated, (and some are!) but a deeper dive into the most popular names of the 1910s also reveals a truckload of brilliant names that will be just as appropriate for modern bubs!

Name your baby like an Edwardian

While the list – gleaned from the US Department of Social Security archives – has its fair share of traditional names, many are the kind that translate perfectly across eras.

Elizabeth, Anna, Alice and Rose are choices you would expect to see penned in fancy cursive at the top of someone’s afternoon correspondence. But other names you may not have predicted were top of the pops in the 1910s too. Goldie, Fern, Stella and Opal are names you might expect to encounter in the offspring of a chic Instamummy account. The mums of the Edwardian era thought they were pretty ace too!

When it comes to baby boys’ names, it was more of what you’d expect with the still lovely, super-royal William, George, Charles, Harry and Louis topping the charts. There were other vintage names, such as Otis, Felix, Mike and Max that are as popular at your local play centre as they were back when boys wore knickerbockers and the occasional frock .

They were kind of a big deal last century

The other thing that was interesting is the number of babies with names we consider quite niche now. Take Goldie, for instance. Around 8,500 baby girls received this cute name during the 1910s. There were almost 5,000 Augusts in the baby boy names for the same period.

Of course, in the scheme of things and during a ten year period, it’s not a huge amount, but they still ranked in the top 200 names for each gender so they were kind of a big deal last century.

“The 200 most popular names were taken from a universe that includes 6,948,478 male births and 8,509,896 female births,” the list points out, so it’s kind of a coup to be top of a list of millions, right?!

Some not quite so niche, and more familiar, solid names made the very top spots with almost 380,000 Johns and almost 400,000 Marys. William came in at around 303,000 while Helen was the next most popular name for girls of the 1910s with 248,000.

Here’s our pick of the best names of this era – all these names made the top 200 for their gender (and are perfectly lovely choices for modern kiddos!)