V is for Vicki, sort of
While going to sleep last night, I composed an entire post for V in my head about names. I was going to talk about how trends in names seem to skip a generation but take on their own version when they reappear. For example, the nickname for Victoria was Vicki a generation or two ago. Now the nickname for Victoria is Tori. I had several other examples and personal experiences to relate about how I was named for a neighbor when they were getting ready to turn in the birth certificate. I was the third baby and the third girl in the family. They were sure I was going to be a boy and didn't have a girl's name picked out. And so on. I've had a busy day and it's time to go to bed again. So as not to be writing a post all night in my head, I'm going to put a quick one out now.
Sometime during the day, I realized my personal example wouldn't work with my alias name, so I decided to go in a bit of a different direction. I'm going to give you a few statistics from the Social Security data base for names in the US.
First some parameters.
--They have data from 1879-present, but most of it is only compiled through 2017
--Many people born before 1937 did not apply for a card, so that group is under represented.
--They only use the top 1000 names each year. This represents about 75% (plus or minus) of the data at any one time.
--Different spellings of the same name were counted as different names. For example, Kelli, Kelly, and Kelley were all counted separately instead as one name.
So what are the most popular names of the last 100 years (1918-2017)? James and Mary
How about for 2017? Liam and Emma
But the most important statistics for this post are below.
For the last 100 years here the rankings for the V names that made the list:
Virginia 45
Victoria 58
Vincent 95, the only V name on the boys side
(1 is the most popular and 100 is the least popular.)
If you like numbers and want to check out some of your family names or name trends, this is an interesting site to visit. Be forewarned, that it's an easy place to get sucked in for some time before you realize it. Don't ask me how I know. :)
