Back in bloom: the names your great-grandparents loved
Hazel, Violet, Eleanor and Theodore spent most of the last century out of favor. Now they’re everywhere. Here’s what the records show about names that skip a few generations.
There’s a familiar pattern in the birth records. A name is everywhere, then it isn’t, and then, about a century later, it turns up again on a new generation of name tags. Parents rarely borrow from their own parents’ generation; those names still belong to someone they know. Their great-grandparents’ names are different. They feel storied rather than dated.
Nobody set this as a rule, and plenty of names never come back. But the pattern is strong enough that name watchers have a nickname for it: the hundred-year rule.
Hazel, again
In the first decade of the 1900s, American parents gave the name Hazel to 23,991 babies, nearly all of them girls. By the 1970s the figure for the whole decade had fallen to about 1,500. Since 2016 it has climbed back to 56,782, and in 2025 Hazel was the 21st most common name for girls.
Violet traced almost the same curve: 7,849 babies in the 1900s, just 1,243 in the 1970s, and 57,906 since 2016. Its busiest year on record isn’t 1910; it’s 2025.
Hazel
“from the hazel tree”
>99% girls
Violet
“resembling the purplishblue flower”
>99% girls
Eleanor
“shining light”
>99% girls
Clara
>99% girls
The Eleanors and Theodores
Eleanor went from 2,750 babies in the whole of the 1970s to 64,581 in the decade since 2016, reaching 12th place for girls in 2025. Clara, a favorite of the 1910s, has come back more gently: 3,290 girls in the 1970s, 29,240 since 2016.
Boys’ names move differently. They tend to be steadier, with fewer sharp peaks, but Theodore is the exception that proves the rule. It never disappeared, yet it’s now far more common than it ever was in its first life: 91,446 boys since 2016, and fourth place in 2025. Arthur is earlier in the same story. It was given to more than 65,000 boys in the 1950s, faded, and has grown by about two-thirds in just the last five years.
A name that sounds like your grandmother sounds old. A name that sounds like her mother sounds like a story.
What brings a name back?
The records can show that a name returned, but not why. A few things seem to help:
- A soft, simple sound. Many of the returning names are short, with open vowels: Hazel, Mabel, Clara.
- A natural or literary image. Flower and gem names, and names from classic novels, feel both old and fresh.
- Distance. When no one you know is called Mabel, you hear the name instead of a person.
Mabel is a good one to watch. It still ranks only around 200th for girls, but it has grown about 70 percent in five years.
A name coming back isn’t better than one that never left, or one that’s brand new. It’s just a reminder that names travel in time, and that the name you love may have a whole first life waiting to be discovered on its profile.