Old Fashioned Names That Fell Out of Use

How did we decide a name is old fashioned?

We did not pick names by feel. We took every name that reached the top 100 for girls or boys in any decade from the 1900s to the 1930s, then kept only the ones ranked below #1000 in both the 2010s and the 2020s Social Security data. That is a fall of hundreds or thousands of places, measured, not guessed.

Betty is the sharpest drop on the girls’ side: #2 in the 1930s, #1,138 in the 2020s. Mildred was #6 in the 1910s and is #1,942 now. On the boys’ side the list is shorter, because many men’s names from that time, like John, William and James, never left.

Why do old lady names feel old?

Because the women who carry them were born a century ago. A girl named Gladys or Bertha in 1905 would be a grandmother by the 1960s, so a whole generation met those names on grandmothers, great aunts and teachers. When a name stops being given to babies, it ages with the people who already have it.

That is useful on the page. Name a young character Ethel and the reader assumes a joke or a family story. Name an 80 year old Ethel in a story set in the 1980s and nobody blinks, because she would have been born around 1905, when Ethel was a top 20 name.

Which old fashioned names are coming back?

Not these. The list here is the names that stayed gone. Some names from the same years did return, like Hazel, Violet and Eleanor, and they have their own page on vintage names that came back, measured the same way from the rank history.