Sunday, February 02, 2014

Suprisingly common saint names

Because of the recent xkcd blag post referred to in my previous entry and because I like names a fair bit (and because I watched His Girl Friday again recently), I've been thinking about names lately. I was digging through the "top 1000" list and noting that there are a lot of very traditional saints' names on the list that you might not expect to see and which you may, therefore, want to consider, as they are not longer so uncommon. I won't comment on traditionally popular names, since those are already popular.

Among boys:
  • Aidan/Aiden. The latter is the more common at the moment, but the two are extremely popular right now - like, top 10.
  • Julian was #53 last year.
  • Adrian, Sebastian, and Dominic were all between 60th and 70th.
  • Damian and Vincent were both around #100.
  • Leo and Victor were around #130 - both more common than Patrick, which was #142.
  • Roman is #159, making it more popular than Peter (#205), Simon (#255), Paul (#193), Theodore (#197), or George (#166). It is more popular than Mark (#176), but Mark has other variants, one of which (Marcus, #149) is more popular than Roman. The above, however, do not have other popular variants in America.
  • Maximus, at #206, is only slightly less common than Peter.
  • Rafael (#286) is more popular than Gregory (#287).
  • Several variants of Emmanuel are in the top 300.
  • The variant Alexis, ie, the man of God, is fairly common, but right now it's much more common as a girl's name.
Among girls: I was surprised to see how popular Gabri- variant names are right now, and to see that Victoria is a top-30 name. Valentina is at #150. Genevieve is as #223. Nadia is at #293. Other than that, I don't really see any surprising saint names in the first few hundred, just ones you might expect to see. Other countries are more interesting. Right now in America, you can get away with naming a girl just about anything with a lot of vowels.