29 May 2023

Baby Names and the Movies

A Note from Ken

When I wrote this post in 2010, it was about popular baby names at that time and particularly the effect of the Twilight movie series on baby names. What I didn't expect was how popular the post would be over the years - and that it would create another "Twilight effect."

When a post gets a lot of hits/visits, it moves up in my site's rankings and also in the way search engines rank pages. That attracts visitors and it also attracts spammers. (Hello India!) This post (in its original  2010 form) got more spam comments than any other post. It is not the most popular post here but it is the most popular with spammers who want to leave a comment with links to their sites or services. I took down the post for a few weeks and made some changes to the post and title in 2021but it still had the "twilight spam effect."

It's back and we;ll see what happens this time.




“Anything can influence baby names, from pop culture to literature to music and celebrities,” says Jennifer Moss, author of The One-in-a-Million Baby Name Book and founder of Babynames.com.

Looking back at the top baby names in 2009 shows that Moms and Dads were looking to popular vampire books and the first family for baby names. Fame can be fleeting - Miley (Cyrus) and Jonas (as in the brothers) took a stock market dive at the end of 2009.

            


Isabella was the top baby name for girls, Jacob for boys. Isabella’s climb to the top in 2009 ended Emma’s one-year reign. Jacob is on an 11-year run at the top. The surname of the Twilight movie series vampire Edward Cullen became the fastest-rising baby boy name in 2009.

Barack didn’t crack the top 1,000 for boys in 2010, but a version of President Obama's daughter’s name, Malia, was the fastest riser for girls. Maliyah moved up 342 spots, to No. 296, while Malia came in at No. 192, rising 153 spots.

Updating to now, we find these are the top U.S. names currently as supplied by the Social Security Administration from when parents were getting their baby a SS number so they could create all their official paperwork.


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