The Classic Name Formula

Inspiration :: Bernard (painting by Mike Bernard)

It is a question that plagues name nerds- what consists of a classic name? As this brilliant article says, classic is often associated with good especially at this time in fashion history where people are favouring styles that were fashionable decades ago. When this is combined with the minimalist buy-only-a-few-items philosophy, 'classic' is the new modern. But classic is hard to pin down.

I feel that there should be a formula or a system to find classic names but this is hard when classic is so undefinable. Upswing Baby Names (in the post I linked above) did such a great job at this and I would like to have a go myself.

My first though was to find names that were popular in the late 19th century and early 20^th century that are still popular now. Below is a chart of my findings:

The problem with this method is that, because names from the 19th century are popular again now, we see the revival names rather than the classics. Their graphs look like a U shape rather than the level graph you would expect with a classic name.

It also leaves out the names we consider classic (Mary etc.) that are in decline at the moment.

And where do we stop? There are so many names that peaked in the 80s that are still popular today – we can hardly class all of them as popular. In my chart, I used all the names from 1940 and before that are still popular today.  So maybe classic isn’t a fixed state. Maybe it is more fluid. We can’t say that Isla is a classic name at the moment but it may well be in the future.

For my next try, I used the number of times a name had been in the top 100 as a marker. These names have all appeared in the top 100 ten or more times:

But this doesn’t take into account that some of these names just don’t ‘sound’ classic. Mohammed still sounds exotic – even though it has been in the top 100 since the 1920s. Bernard and Janet sound incredibly dated. However, these names appear further down the 'classic' list. We could just use the top few as they seem like the most classic names but that doesn't give parents much of a choice when trying to find the stylish classics they crave.

Sadly, it is obvious that I still haven’t found a foolproof system yet. But I am beginning to understand that when many parents say 'classic', they are actually looking for revival names.