100 popular first name meanings
In "A Dictionary Of First Names," Patrick Hanks, a lexicographer, onomastician, and corpus linguist, and a team of authors have identified the origin and meaning of more than 6,000 first names. We have listed these meanings and origins for the 100 most popular names in the U.S. over the past 100 years. Our list alternates between male and female names with the most popular names appearing first. The names were selected from Social Security data from 169,233,019 male births and 165,941,917 female births collected between 1914 and 2013. Those with highest number of instances are considered the most popular. Here are the original meanings of these common names, according to Hanks and his coauthors Hardcastle and Hodges.