Baby Name Trend Starter

Pain: This might be a different Hercules!
Panic: Yeah! Hercules is a very popular name nowadays!
Pain: Remember like a few years ago, every other boy was named Jason and the girls were all named Brittany?

— Hercules

Fiction has an influence on people, both unconsciously and consciously. Many people are inspired by them—to buy things featured in a work, to get pets due to one being featured in a work, or even to name their child (and to a lesser extent, their pet) after a character featured in a work.

If a work is extremely popular, then it often causes a fad where many babies are named after major characters from the work for about a year or two. In hindsight, it can be easy to tell when someone was born if their name was a popular fad name during that period. Usually, these fads die out quickly, however, some become so popular that they popularize an obscure name (or even a name originally intended for the opposite gender) to the point where the name stays popular long after the popularizing work becomes a distant memory. The bad side of this is that if a name loses popularity after the fad, then it can be awkward for the child later in life (such as if they're named after a fantasy character with an odd name).

Note, that names usually must follow the One-Mario Limit (AKA, they're obscure or even invented names). If they're a common name then the work must have been the main cause of why it became (even more) popular all of a sudden.

To see how names have changed in popularity over the years in Britain, visit this page from the Office for National Statistics, which has an interactive chart.

See Baby Name Trend Killer for when the opposite happens. Subtrope to The Red Stapler.

---

Example subpages:

• Real Life

Other Examples:

Advertising

• An ad for Ivory dishwashing liquid, featuring a character introduced as Deneen, is credited for the rise of the name in 1964.
• The popularly of the Renault Clio ads starring a woman named Nicole and her Papa caused many babies to be named "Nicole".

Anime & Manga

• Daimos was so popular in the Philippines that it became a household name and there are plans of a Filipino live-action adaptation of the anime. The name "Erika" became common for girls in the Phillippines after its airing, after the main female lead - Princess Erika of the Baam.
• Sakura, written in hiragana rather than kanji, shot up to the top 5 girls names in Japan while the Cardcaptor Sakura anime was airing, peaking at #1 in 2000 when the series ended.
• Hello! Sandybell:
  • The anime has led to at least one person in Syria to be named after the main character.
  • Supposedly, "Sandybell" as a baby name in Mexico shot up in popularity after it aired.
• The year that Idol Time PriPara premiered, Yui, the name of the show's protagonist, topped baby name charts in Japan.
• During the year of Kirakira Precure A La Mode, one of the protagonists' names, Himari, went up 8 places as runner-up.
• Mei has become a top 10 baby name in Japan thanks to it being the name of one of the girls in My Neighbor Totoro. In 2014, it was the most popular girl name.
• Apparently, Saki became somewhat of a popular baby girl name back when Sukeban Deka was hot. Actress and singer Saki Fukuda is named that way because her mother was a fan of the series, while AV actress Saki Ninomiya goes under artistic name because her parents were fans as well (she was born the year in which the series premiered, and has implied in interviews that Saki is her true given name).

Comic Books

• French Space Opera comic-book Valérian invented the name Laureline for the female protagonist. It is not an unheard name for French women today.

Films — Animation

• Frozen:
  • In the year after the release of the film, the popularity of the name "Elsa" went up 242 spots in the US and 243 spots in the UK, where it became the 88th most popular baby name for girls.
  • In Japan, among the top 10 baby names for girls in 2015 were Anna and Rin (Rin meaning "cold" in Japanese, which was also popular due to the character Rin Hoshizora in the Love Live! original series - 2015 was the peak of popularity for that particular branch of the franchise).
• The year after Ice Age came out, Diego, the name of one of the main animal characters in the movie, jumped from the 140th most popular baby name in the United States to number 83.
• The year before Inside Out was released, the name of the film's protagonist, Riley, was the 32nd most popular baby name for girls in the United States. After the film's release, the name jumped 20 places up on the chart to become the 12th most popular girl's name and then became the 7th most popular baby name in 2016. It then became the third most popular baby name in 2020, in time with the film's sudden boom in popularity on Disney+.
• After The Little Mermaid (1989) came out, the name "Ariel" exponentially became more popular. Unfortunately, the name "Ursula" suffered the reverse.
• Sleeping Beauty:
  • "Aurora" as a baby name took a while to catch on, but it suddenly became much more popular in the 2000s, notably around the time the Disney Princess line was established, which gave the film a renewed burst of popularity. It leapt up even higher after Maleficent was released.
  • "Meriweather" was known as a boys' name before the movie (with Merry being a common nickname for it), but it's now associated with girls after the good fairy.
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse:
  • The surprise critical and commercial acclaim of the movie made "Miles", an already popular name, jump 23 places from 98th to 75th in 2019, and continued to grow to 54th place by 2020.
  • "Gwen", an uncommon name, saw a big bump in popularity, jumping 82 places from 909th to 827th place in 2019.
• Keanu Reeves' character in The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run, Sage, caused the name to increase in popularity for both boys and girls despite the film only having a teaser trailer released at that point. It helps that the actor who played the character is extremely popular, and the trailer frequently showed up before many theatrical releases around this period.
• The name "Flynn" jumped up 871 places a year after the release of Tangled.
• Toy Story:
  • Andy jumped up 25 places the year after Toy Story's release. However, it declined around the time Toy Story 2 came out.
  • The name of Keanu Reeves' character in Toy Story 4, Duke, grew in popularity due to the success of both the actor and the film.

Films — Live-Action

• As detailed here, Breakfast at Tiffany's is singlehandedly responsible for the explosive spread of Tiffany as a name in the '70s and '80s. Amusingly enough, the main character's name is actually "Holly", and the title refers to the jewelry store ("Tiffany" was the surname of the family who started the jewelry store).
• The Breakfast Club caused many parents to name their baby daughters Allison after one of the main characters in the film, becoming a top ten girl's name for most of the '90s.
• Charlie's Angels (2000) seems to have done this with "Dylan" as a girl's name, even as various real-life tragedies (noted on the Baby Name Trend Killer page) took off its shine as a boy's name. Before that film came out, it was an almost entirely masculine name, one that went with her tomboy demeanor.
• The popularity of Clerks in The '90s caused a lot of parents to name their newborn sons "Dante" after the film's protagonist Dante Hicks. While it wasn't a box-office hit, it became extremely well-traveled on home video in the latter half of the decade, which was when the name really took off.
• "Luke" may be a Biblical name, but it skyrocketed in popularity following the release of Cool Hand Luke in 1967. Amusingly: it got even more popular a decade later following the release of the original Star Wars, likely thanks to Luke Skywalker.
• The name "Clementine" had its greatest popularity from around 1910 to 1950, with around a hundred newborn girls given the name per year in the U.S. It dropped off significantly after that, such that from the 1970s to the early 2000s there were often fewer than ten girls given the name per year. Then it exploded in popularity starting in 2005, with instances in recent years far exceeding even the previous peak period. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, with Kate Winslet's character named Clementine, came out in 2004.
• While the name "Kevin" had become modestly popular for German boys in the '80s, it reached its peak as the most common name in 1991 after the release of Home Alone and stayed very high in popularity for the rest of the '90s. Unfortunately, as noted on the Baby Name Trend Killer page, stereotypes concerning this and other "American" names later killed it stone-dead in the '00s.
• Stanley Kubrick's 1962 adaption of Lolita had a positive effect on the name "Lolita" itself, which had fallen out of popularity thanks to the original book but had a small resurgence following the film's release. In Lolita itself, the girl is actually named Dolores, variously nicknamed Dolly, Lo, or Lola. Lolita was the pseudo-intellectual Humbert's "fancy" nickname for her.
• The name "Jennifer" received a boost with the release of Love Story, becoming the single most common female given name in the United States for the years 1970-1984, where it had previously been relatively uncommon. Then it happened in Spanish. Love Story (and the many works that followed it) briefly made Jennifer a popular name in Spain, where it didn't exist in any form, and where before Franco's death, it was extremely discouraged to use non-standard (read: non-Catholic) names.
• The Marvel Cinematic Universe inspired many parents to name their children after its characters, among others "Valkyrie", "Quill", "Rocket", and "Hawkeye". Even more so, in 2017, 50 children were given the name "Marvel".
• The Matrix inspired a lot of parents to name their daughters "Trinity" after its Action Girl supporting character. In 1999, the year of the film's release, it skyrocketed from #523 in the rankings of American girl's names to #209, and was in the top 100 from 2000 through 2012, peaking at #48 in 2004, the year after the release of the sequels Reloaded and Revolutions. A similar effect also happened in the UK, though not as large.
• The success of The Notebook caused an increase in the number of babies named Noah in the United States. Nine years after that film's release, the name topped the chart for male baby names.
• "Damien" saw a brief but gigantic spike in popularity after The Omen (1976) came out thanks to that film's iconic villain, The Antichrist Damien Thorn. Ironically, the name was originally associated with a saint, but the film used it as a Louis Cypher name due to how similar it sounded to the word "demon", and thus made it sound badass. It rose again in popularity in the 2000s, particularly a brief one-day spike among boys born on June 6, 2006 — which, not coincidentally, was also the release date of the remake.
• "Samara" spiked in popularity in the mid-'00s after the release of the American remake of The Ring. This one is especially notable because the original Japanese version of the film, Ringu, destroyed the popularity of "Sadako", its name for the Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl villain.
• Scream (1996)
  • The film marked a turning point in "Sidney" going from a boy's name to a unisex name, thanks to its Final Girl Sidney Prescott. While the name was already rising in popularity before the film came out, it spiked even higher afterwards, as did the alternate spelling "Sydney", which was in the top 25 girl's names from 1999 through 2003 (likely also helped along by Alias).
  • "Tatum", the name of Sidney's best friend, also took off as a girl's name after having been almost unheard of before the film came out. It continued rising in popularity, and in the 2010s became a unisex name.
• "Madison" as a first name was almost nonexistent when the movie Splash was made, and was mostly a boy's name when it did appear. (It derives from an old English/Welsh name that either means "Matthew's son" or "Maude's son", so that makes sense.) Then after the film's mermaid picked up the name, it exploded in popularity as a girl's name, reaching the top ten in girls' names in the United States in 1997, staying there over a decade and a half, and even reaching second in 2001 and '02, before dropping to eleventh in 2015. (It also reappeared as a boys' name after Splash was released, but never attained the explosive popularity that it did as a girls' name.) In the film itself, it was a Line-of-Sight Name taken from a street sign (Madison Avenue in New York City); Tom Hanks' character's immediate reaction is, "That's not a [feminine first] name!"

Literature

• Millions of baby girls were named Alice after the success of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
• The name "Vanessa" was invented by Jonathan Swift for his lover Esther Vanhomrigh ("Van" from her surname, "Essa" from a pet form of her given one) and used in his semi-autobiographical poem Cadenus and Vanessa, published after Vanhomrigh's death. The name became a popular choice for girls following the publication of the poem.
  • This becomes a plot point in one of the Doctor Who tie-in novels, where the Doctor recognises a character as a secret time-traveller because she's trying to blend in in Ancient Rome with the name Vanessa, when of course it didn't exist then.
• "Ayla" is a Turkish and Scottish feminine name (in the latter case it's a variant on Aila or Isla), which became a lot more popular in Western countries from the 1980s onwards following the success of the Earth's Children series.
• The name Eric (and its variants) had been pretty much unknown in Britain following the end of the Danelaw. In 1858, a novel titled Eric, or Little by Little was published. Although largely forgotten today, this was one of the most popular children's novels of the era and created a vogue for the name Eric that lasted until World War I, when it fell out favour due to its Germanic connotations.
• For a long time, Tatiana was considered a vulgar, peasant name in Russia. Then along came Eugene Onegin, and the name’s popularity skyrocketed among all the social classes.
• The Fault in Our Stars made "Hazel" jump to the top 100 baby names two years after its release, which was when the film adaptation came out.
• The introduction of Amber as a name after the mid-20th century has been attributed to Kathleen Windsor's sweeping historical romance Forever Amber. Jewel names have long been popular, but at the time of the book's setting, Amber was considered one of the more exotic, unusual jewel names, along with such names Emerald and Topaz. By the time the book was written, however, jewel names were considered embarrassingly old-fashioned but for a few popular holdouts such as Ruby and Pearl, so the reintroduction of Amber was a double blast from the past. These days the name's popularity has nearly eclipsed the original book.
• The Polish/Lithuanian name "Grażyna" was invented by the poet Adam Mickiewicz for his narrative poem Grażyna, A Lithuanian story. It's derived from the Lithuanian word graži, meaning "beautiful", and it was widespread in Poland up until around the 1980s.
• By the time the Harry Potter series concluded in 2007, the previously rare name "Hermione" had experienced a huge spike in popularity, as did the less-rare-but-still-uncommon names "Luna" and "Lily". The names Ron(ald) and Harry have long been perennial standards but likewise experienced a significant spike attributed to the series.
• Heidi is a rare name in English-speaking countries. Without the influence of Heidi, it probably wouldn't be a name at all.
• "Katniss" was unheard of as a given name before the release of The Hunger Games, which led a number of parents to give their daughters the name in the early 2010s. It enjoyed another boost in 2020 with the release of the prequel novel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
• Since the 1960s, naming your child after a character from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings has been something of a trend for aging hippies and nerds. "Galadriel" has been on the US popular name list since 1969.
• The Mortal Instruments did this for "Jace", a short form of "Jason", which started skyrocketing in the late '00s, jumped into the top 100 boy's names by 2012, and overtook the name it was derived from the following year.
• The name "Pamela" was invented by Samuel Richardson for the book Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. This generated one of the first entertainment marketing booms, with Pamela towels, dishes, playing cards, stationery, etc. In 1740.
• J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan popularized the name Wendy so much after its release that he is often erroneously credited with inventing the name. At the time, it was nothing more than an obscure nickname for Gwendolyn.
• The novel Peyton Place and its subsequent film and TV adaptations led to a surge in girls named Alison.
• The success of Pippi Longstocking outside its native Sweden popularized the name "Annika" in many other countries.
• Many red-nosed pets, especially dogs, are named after the title character of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
• Shirley was a boy's name until Charlotte Brontë gave the heroine of her novel that name. After that, it became much more popular as a girl's name, as Shirley Temple and the writers of Airplane! can attest.
• Before it was a name, "Mavis" was an outdated word for a thrush, until Marie Corelli used it in The Sorrows of Satan for the character Mavis Clare. As a result, real people started naming their daughters Mavis, and the name was quite popular in the first half of the twentieth century.
• The names "Isabella", "Edward", and "Jacob" were popular before The Twilight Saga was published. Still, they saw a significant boost, as did the invented name "Renesmee", given to 55 baby girls in the US in 2010.
• Back in the 1850s, Uncle Tom's Cabin boosted the popularity of the name "Eva," after the novel's tragic ill girl. One reader apparently considered renaming her existing daughter after the character.
• The name "Svetlana" was invented by the Russian poet Alexander Vostokov in 1802, and popularized by another, Vasily Zhukovsky, in 1813. It's still hugely popular today, both in Russia and outside it, and is even used as the Russian translation of a Greek saint's name. "Svetlana" wasn't a nonsense word, though; "svet" means light, and it's a little like naming your daughter "Radiance" or something. The closest English equivalent would be Helen.

Live-Action TV — Scripted Series

• A combination of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the 2012 version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles having a character nicknamed Leo caused the name to jump up 30 places in 2013.
• Beverly Hills, 90210:
  • The boy's names "Dylan" and "Brandon" experienced a surge in popularity during the run of.
  • For a long time, Andrea was an exclusively male name in Italy (one of the most popular ones as well), while the female version was Andreina. The popularity of Beverly Hills 90210 caused several Italian families to start to use Andrea also for girls, and now it's officially a unisex name in the country. While it's still vastly more common for boys, the use of Andrea as a female name has pretty much replaced Andreina, and since the '90s, there have been a lot more Italian young girls named Andrea rather than Andreina.
• Bewitched:
  • "Samantha" was a fairly uncommon girl's name in the US before the show premiered. Ironically, it was picked as an Outdated Name to highlight that the witch Samantha Stephens was Really 700 Years Old, but the thousands of parents who named their daughters after her ruined that mystique.
  • The series also popularized the name "Tabitha" after the child witch on the show had that name, a boom that lasted through The '80s.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • "Xander" picked up as a boy's name since the series came out, with the biggest spike in usage coming the year that Buffy went off the air. Since then, it's remained modestly popular. Interestingly, "Xander" was technically a common name to begin with; the Buffy character's full name is "Alexander;" he simply shortened it to to "Xander" rather than the more conventional "Alex."
  • Charisma Carpenter, who played Cordelia Chase on Buffy and Angel, has said that numerous fans tell her they named their daughters Cordelia after her. The name had declined in popularity after the 1800s, and the show gave it a small resurgence.
• "Grayson" became a popular boy's name after it was used as the name of Jules' husband in Cougar Town. The year after the show's premiere in 2009, it jumped up 50 places on the popular baby names chart, and it has been in the top 50 since 2015.
• Charmed (1998):
  • The name Piper emerged into the top 1000 baby names in 1999, and popularity only increased in the 2000s, reaching a peak in 2015. This was coincidentally after Charmed became available on VOD and was the most binged series in 2012.
  • While the popularity of the name Phoebe is more attributed to Friends, the name 'Alyssa', after Phoebe's actress Alyssa Milano entered the top twenty after the series premiered and stayed there until 2010.
• "Dexter" enjoyed a large bump as a boy's name in the late '00s and early '10s thanks to the TV show of the same name. While the show's main character Dexter Morgan was a Serial Killer and a Villain Protagonist, he was also a handsome and charismatic one with a lot of redeeming qualities who only killed people who deserved it, and so, for many young parents, the name came to be seen as dark but cool.
• Doctor Who:
  • The name "Amelia" experienced a surge in popularity thanks to the character Amelia Jessica "Amy" Pond, topping the list of girl's names in the UK from 2011-15 (and sitting at #2 since then) and hitting #4 in the US.
  • This also happened with "River" in the 2010s thanks to both Doctor Who and another sci-fi series, Firefly, having Action Girl characters by that name. While Firefly had only a brief run and lousy ratings in 2002 due to it getting Screwed by the Network, it built its cult fandom in the ensuing years, especially after its creator Joss Whedon enjoyed a Career Resurrection in the early '10s. One of the show's characters, the Little Miss Badass River Tam, became especially iconic. Around that time, Doctor Who also introduced a popular character named River Song, a Lady of Adventure envisioned as a Distaff Counterpart to the Doctor. Amidst the mainstream explosion of geek culture during that time, the name River came to be seen as one you'd give to a girl who could kick ass and not put up with jerks. The funny thing? The boost was as both a girl's name and a boy's name. As noted below under Real Life, the name had already gotten some attention after the death of the male actor River Phoenix in 1993, and it still had those associations twenty years later.
• "Audrey" jumped up 20 spots on the baby name chart in 2006 after it was used as the name of the mom in Drake & Josh.
• Dynasty (1981): The names "Crystal",^note In a variety of invented spellings, like the show's own "Krystle" "Alexis", "Fallon", and "Dominique" became popular for girls born in The '80s thanks to the show's resident Rich Bitches. Granted, "Dominique" was a pre-existing French name,^note A unisex name, at that. Some of the most famous Dominiques living today are probably men, including Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a French Minister of Finance in the '90s with his eyes on the presidency until a sex scandal caught up with him, and NBA legend Dominique Wilkins. but its popularity in the US grew tenfold thanks to the show.
• After it was used as the name of one of the doctors in ER, "Carter" became a popular name for boys.
• The Brazilian Soap Opera Escrava Isaura was extremely popular in Poland, and caused a number of young girls to be named Isaura.
• Family Ties led to "Mallory" becoming a popular girls' name, even though it was almost completely nonexistent prior to the show (and was basically a last name adopted into a first name). Unlike "Madison", which came about under similar circumstances, "Mallory" died out quickly after the show ended.
• Friends: The show's main characters became a seminal influence on baby names in the '90s and early '00s when it was at the height of its popularity.
  • "Rachel" was already a popular name before the show's success, but afterwards, it saw a surge in popularity that briefly made it one of the top 10 girl's names in 1996.
  • The name of her baby, Emma, also boomed in popularity, to the point where it's currently one of the top 10 names for baby girls, helped along by various other entries on this list.
  • This also happened to "Phoebe" for the same reason.
  • "Chandler" was a fairly uncommon first name before the show's premiere in 1994, but the following year saw it rapidly spike into the top 200 boy's names, where it would remain through 2000.
  • "Ross" had already peaked as a boy's name in The '80s and fallen off since, but the show's premiere caused a small boomlet in the mid-'90s.
• The popularity of Game of Thrones led to many baby girls named "Arya" (or "Aria") and "Khaleesi". The latter is a title for Daenerys Targaryen, not a proper name in the series itself; "Daenerys" itself hasn't become nearly as popular.^note Unfortunately, the popularity of "Khaleesi" and "Daenerys" took a major hit after the show's controversial final season.
• Glee had this impact on "Finn" and "Quinn", the names of two of the main characters on that show. Notably, Quinn was known mainly, though not exclusively, as a boy's name before it was given to cheerleader Quinn Fabray, after which it skyrocketed in popularity as a girl's name and eventually entered the top 100 for such.
• Grey's Anatomy caused the previously rare and old-fashioned name "Sadie" (a diminutive of "Sarah") to jump into the top 100 baby names the year after the show's premiere.
• "Malcolm" saw a brief rise in popularity thanks to the success of Malcolm in the Middle, though it trailed off after the series concluded.
• The telenovela Marimar is popular in the Philippines. As a result, "Marimar" is a common name for female dogs.
• Modern Family: The pet dog Stella caused many people to give their daughters and pets the same name.
• After it was used as the name of Murphy Brown's mother, many people named their baby girls Avery. Like Madison, the name had only been used for boys prior to the show's premiere, but it soon became one of the most popular names for girls, peaking at #12 in 2013.
• While the name "Peyton" existed prior to One Tree Hill (especially with the popularity of Peyton Place), its popularity saw a resurgence since the show's 2003 debut. Notably, while it had been a unisex name before then, afterwards it was mostly given to girls.
• In addition to the aforementioned Game of Thrones, Pretty Little Liars also had a strong hand in parents naming their daughters "Aria" in the 2010s after the show's protagonist Aria Montgomery. To a lesser degree, there was also a brief spike in girls named "Hanna" (without the "H" at the end) after the show premiered.
• From Sex and the City, Carrie's rugged puppy Aidan seems to have inspired a resurgence in that name and its variant "Aiden".
• Supernatural:
  • In 2013, the name "Castiel" appeared in the top 1,000 baby names in the United States.
  • "Dean" also rose in popularity around the same time after having declined for several decades.
• thirtysomething:
  • The name "Ethan" jumped almost 200 places to the top 100 boy's names in the US after it was used as one of the names of the children in the show. From 2002 through 2015, it was in the top 10.
  • The name "Brittany" made the top 10 girl's names list the year after the show's premiere.
• True Blood made "Sookie" the fastest-growing name for girls in 2010.
• The Walking Dead made "Ezekiel" gain popularity again after lingering in obscurity for many years (due to being considered a Hayseed Name). In 2018, it made the top 100 baby names.
• Yellowstone:
  • Before the show premiered, "Dutton" was unheard of as a given name, and indeed, on the show it's the last name of the central family. Afterwards, it became one of the fastest-growing baby names of 2022.
  • "Kayce", an abbreviated variant on "Casey", was also on that list thanks to Kayce Dutton.

Live-Action TV — Non-Scripted Series

• In 1992, Lisa Kennedy Montgomery, better known mononymously as simply Kennedy, started hosting Alternative Nation on MTV. By the time the show ended in 1997, "Kennedy" went from almost unheard of as a first name (and a boy's name when it was used) to one of the 200 most popular girl's names in the US. Since 2011, it's been in the top 100.
• The name "Ruth" increased in popularity after a contestant on The Bachelor gave her daughter the name.
• Duck Dynasty caused many parents to name their kids after members of the Robertson family, most notably "Jase" after Willie's brother and the COO of their company Duck Commander (his real name was Jason, but he normally went by his nickname), "Sadie" after Willie's teenage daughter^note Which, as noted above, already had a smaller boost in the '00s thanks to Grey's Anatomy, and "Silas" after Willie's Cloudcuckoolander uncle (who often went by just "Si"). Thanks to the Robertson family's devoutly religious Good Ol' Boy public image, the names were especially popular with Christian parents.
• Keeping Up with the Kardashians gave a brief spike to the names "Kourtney" and "Khloe" in the early '10s. To a lesser extent, it also happened to "Chloe", who Khloé Kardashian's first name is a variation of, though that name had been rising in popularity for a while by that point.
• "Nellie" rose from 668 to 307 due to the variant "Nelly" being borne by the daughter of Billie Faiers of The Only Way Is Essex.
• Survivor: The Australian Outback contestant Colby Donaldson inspired people to name their kids Colby following his season, as explained by Jeff Probst when Colby made his return in the All-Stars season.
• "Carson" has two fathers for its popularity. First, the retirement of Johnny Carson from hosting The Tonight Show in 1992 caused many mothers to name their sons (and even a few daughters) Carson in his honor, with the name having a steady increase in popularity ever since. The biggest surge, however, came in the late '90s and early '00s when Carson Daly started hosting the MTV music video countdown show Total Request Live. It saw another, smaller spike in 2006, the year after Johnny Carson's death, when it permanently entered the top 100 after hanging around just outside it for a few years before that.

Music

• The name "Kayleigh" was popularized in the U.K. after it appeared in a 1985 hit single of the same name by the British Progressive Rock band Marillion. The name itself was derived from "Kay Lee", an ex-girlfriend of singer Derek "Fish" Dick.
• "Hey There Delilah" by the Plain White T's caused "Delilah", long a fairly rare and exotic girl's name, to suddenly explode in popularity in 2006. Since 2018, it's been one of the 100 most popular girl's names in both the US and the UK.
• The Australian singer-songwriter John Williamson created a song about a tomboy whose father nicknamed her Cydy (short for sidekick). It is now an official (if still mostly uncommon) Australian girl name.

Radio

• In The Archers in The '80s, a child was born into the Ambridge farming community. In keeping with this trope, the scriptwriters opted to name the infant Kylie, after a soap-opera-actress-turned-pop-singer who was quite big at the time and indeed sparking a wave of baby naming in the UK. The expectation in a very long-running soap opera was that the pop singer would quickly vanish into obscurity, leaving the character to grow up with a vaguely embarrassing name she'd quietly hate her parents for giving her. In 2023, however, the character Kylie is approaching forty. And Kylie Minogue is still very much with us.

Religion/Mythology

• The Bible has been a popular source of baby names for centuries. Common examples include Adam, Angel^note As well as specific angels like Daniel, Michael, Nathaniel, and Raphael, Elijah, Eve, Isaiah, Joseph, Joshua, Leah, Luke, Mary, Matthew, Rebecca, Ruth, and so on. This also includes variations in different languages: Maria (the most popular name in the world), Marie, Mariah, etc.
• Greco-Roman mythology has also been a centuries-long source of baby names, with Jason and Diana being the most common in the modern Anglosphere, though Cassandra, Hector, Orion, Selene, Troy, and Venus are fairly popular as well.

Theatre

• The name "Jennifer" became hugely popular in the United Kingdom after George Bernard Shaw gave it to the female lead in his 1906 play The Doctor's Dilemma. At the time, it was an uncommon name derived from "Guinevere".

Toys

• While the name "Barbara" peaked in the late 1930s and early '40s and has been on a steady decline since, its diminutive "Barbie" briefly spiked in The '60s thanks to the famous doll bearing that name. (Ruth Handler, Barbie's creator, named the doll after her daughter Barbara.)

Video Games

• Enforced by Bethesda, who announced a challenge for players of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: if any of them had a child on its then-latest release date (11/11/11) and named it after a Skyrim character, the child could get free games for life. At least one couple did it, with their son Dovahkiin.
• Aeris first entered the baby naming charts just after a certain character^note later localized as Aerith from Final Fantasy VII first appeared in 1997. Though still rare, the name had basically never been used prior, and it enjoyed a rising popularity until the end of the 2010s.
• A few parents were inspired to name their daughters "Cortana" after the AI from the Halo series, particularly after Halo 3, when it entered the baby charts. Well over a hundred of them exist now in the US.
• Horizon Zero Dawn invented the girl's name "Aloy" for its protagonist. Since the game's release in 2017, nearly sixty girls have been named Aloy, with the biggest spike coming in 2022 with the release of its sequel Forbidden West.
• The name "Zelda" had been out of vogue for decades by the time The Legend of Zelda came out. Now it's a fairly common name thanks to the perennial popularity of the series, with a particularly big spike in babies named Zelda after Breath of the Wild released. Robin Williams' daughter Zelda Williams is a famous example of someone named after the character. For the record, the character herself was named after a famous person, Zelda Fitzgerald.
• "Raiden" has apparently taken off as a name in the US after Mortal Kombat (which also led to parents naming their daughters Kitana and Mileena) and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.
• In English-speaking countries, the name Laura spiked in the late 1970s/early 1980s, died down, but popped up again briefly as "Lara" around the beginning of the 2000s in a resurgence attributed to the Tomb Raider franchise. Oddly, it doesn't seem that many gamers directly named their daughters after the character, but that the game's popularity simply caused the name's visibility to increase enough that non-gamers became more aware of it.

Western Animation

• The name "Finn" rose in popularity after Adventure Time debuted, to the point where in 2017, the name jumped 200 places higher than it was before the show premiered! (Although another Finn in 2015's The Force Awakens probably also helped.) The name "Marceline" also started rising after 2013, and as of 2022 is the most popular it's ever been in the USA.
• Before Batman: The Animated Series, "Harley" was known as a boy's name, and an older one at that. Then the show invented the character of Harley Quinn as a Distaff Counterpart, sidekick, and girlfriend to the Joker, which not only revived the name but made it more common among girls than boys. The Batman: Arkham Series of video games and her live-action debut in Suicide Squad (2016) created an even bigger bump in the 2010s.
• Before the premiere of Bubble Guppies, Gil was a very obscure name. In 2012, the name hit the top 3,000 baby names in the United States thanks to the show's popularity.
• An interesting example of this trope: after the Animated Adaptation of Curious George became popular in Japan (a country which usually uses traditional names), more people started using the name George (or Joji in Japanese) for their kids. This trend also may have explained why many recent anime like HuGtto! Pretty Cure and King of Prism have featured characters with that name.
• "Daria" saw a brief jump in popularity in the late '90s thanks to the animated series of the same name.
• The popularity of Elena of Avalor caused the name of its protagonist to rise 50 places the year after it premiered.
• "Mabel" jumped 300 places after the premiere of Gravity Falls. Its popularity outlasted the show; in the UK, it reentered the top 100 girl's names in 2019 and has continued its ascent since. Ironically, the joke with Mabel was that Alex Hirsch deliberately wanted to give her a name that was very old-fashioned and a bit uncool, its previous peak of popularity having been in the late 19th century. Pacifica Northwest even lampshaded this in their first meeting, calling it "a fat old lady's name."
• After the premiere of The Loud House, the name of the protagonist Lincoln and one of his sisters, Luna, rose in popularity, with the former reaching the top 50 and the latter cracking the top 10.
• PAW Patrol:
  • In 2016, the names Chase and Skyler^note often shortened to Skye made the top 100 baby names due to them being the names of two of the show's most popular characters.
  • On a smaller note, the name "Rocky", which had declined in the 2000s and was not in the top 1000 baby names for that decade as a result, began a slow rise in popularity once one of the show's dogs had that name, returning to the top 1,000 in 2014.
  • In Japan, Kento, which was the dub name of Ryder, became a popular boys' name after the show's Japanese premiere.
• The name "Wyatt" rose in popularity after the premiere of Super Why! due to the titular protagonist having that name in his non-superhero form (albeit spelled "Whyatt").

In-Universe Examples:

Advertising

• In this Nike ad, Wayne Rooney's success starts a trend to name babies "Wayne".

Comic Books

• In one very heartwarming short Spider-Man story, where a pregnant woman he just saved insisted on learning his real name to name her baby in his honor. After some thought, Peter tells her it's Ben, and she happily resolves to use it. The last page shows many other new parents, all also naming their children Ben and, presuming the woman kept her promise of keeping Spider-Man's name secret, the implication is both that Peter gets this request a lot and every time he covertly honors his Uncle Ben with it.
• Superman once raced a woman to a hospital just before she gave birth. Afterwards, he hoped the kid wouldn't get grief when the other kids learned what his middle initial "S." stood for.

Fan Works

• Inverted in the Triptych Continuum: by tradition, no newborns are ever named after the Princesses, and a mother who'd had just given birth directly told Twilight that nopony would ever be given that name again.

Literature

• Discussed in Chronicles of the Necromancer when protagonist Tris is on the run and can use his real name, as the his mother's, his, and little sister Kait's names are popular among commoners because the royals themselves were popular. This is something that Tris's evil half-brother, Jared and his late mother never got, and another point of resentment Jared feels for his younger half-brother.
• In The Shadow Campaigns, it's mentioned that it's fairly common for commoners to name their children after recently born royals. Princess Raesinia takes advantage of this while going undercover as a schoolgirl revolutionary. Since there are literally hundreds of girls roughly her age named Raesinia, nobody ever considers that she might be that Raesinia.

Video Games

• In Cookie Clicker, one of the headlines says that your cookies become so popular, your bakery's name becomes the most popular baby name.

Visual Novels

• In Double Homework, since Amy is actually a princess, many girls from her country who share her birth date are named after her (including Morgan, whose real name is Amy).

Western Animation

• In the Bob's Burgers episode "Tappy Tappy Tappy Tap Tap Tap", Tina is at Josh's tap show, trying to find out who she thinks sabotaged his show. She tries to interrogate Josh's understudy, Sawyer, but whenever she tries, it turns out to be the wrong Sawyer because there are actually six boys named Sawyer. According to one Sawyer, "Lost was really popular when [they] were born."

---