Old-fashioned baby names that came back.

Every strip on this page is a real Baby Names strip from the Huezle app, drawn by the app’s own code. More about Baby Names.

How to read the strips

Each strip is one name. Each band is one year, running left to right from 1880 to 2024, one band for every third year. The colour is how common the name was among babies of that sex born that year: pale blush for rare, rose for common, and deep plum for everywhere. The scale is the same for every name, so a dark band means the same share of babies on any strip.

Emma: from 1 in 45 girls to 1 in 3,500 and back

18802024

• Rare
• Common
• Everywhere

In 1880 Emma was given to about 1 girl in 45. It then fell in every sampled year for the next 96 years, to a low in 1976 of about 1 girl in 3,500. Then it turned: by 2003 it was back to about 1 in 80, a 44-fold rise from the bottom, and it was the top girls’ name of the 2010s, as the decade story shows.

Deeper troughs, gentler ones

• Ella
• Henry

18802024

• Rare
• Common
• Everywhere

Ella has the deepest trough of the classic comebacks. It was about 1 girl in 79 in 1880; by 1985 only about 1 girl in 11,765 was named Ella. By 2009 it was 62 times more common than at that low. Henry never fell nearly as far, which is why its strip never goes fully pale: its worst sampled year, 1988, was still about 1 boy in 900. It is still climbing, and 2024, the last band, is its highest share since 1931.

The bigger comebacks started smaller

Another kind of comeback starts from a modest name rather than a top one. These were in use in the 1880s without being near the top, dropped almost to nothing, then became some of the most common names of the 21st century.

• Sophia
• Oliver

18802024

• Rare
• Common
• Everywhere

Sophia was about 1 girl in 660 in 1880, fell to about 1 in 17,000 by 1952, and reached about 1 in 79 in 2012, more than 200 times its low point. Oliver bottomed out in 1961 at about 1 boy in 6,100 and was given to about 1 boy in 112 in 2024, its highest share in the data, so its comeback may not be over.

Why old names return

A common explanation is that names skip generations: your parents’ names sound dated, your great-grandparents’ sound fresh. The strips fit that: the troughs here sit between the 1950s and the 1980s, and the returns come a few decades later. Names that never dipped at all are on timeless baby names, and names that rose and fell only once are on one-hit wonder names.

Every number comes from the US Social Security Administration’s national baby-name records, sampled every third year from 1880 to 2024, so a low point or a peak could sit a year or two either side of the year given.

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