Newer Than They Think / Personal Names

• The name Kevin is old by itself, but it only became remotely popular outside Ireland in the mid-20th century and later (as recently as 1933 it was outside the top one thousand names in the US). Captain Darling's first name in Blackadder Goes Forth is more anachronistic than it appears.
• Erin is often considered a "classic" Irish name and is therefore often used by Irish immigrants to honor their heritage. In fact, it is rarely used as a name in Ireland as it is a poetic name for the country itself. It'd be akin to naming your daughter America — it's been done, but not very often and it sounds a bit odd.^note  At least, if you're Anglo. It's common enough to be unremarkable among Spanish speakers, and America Ferrera has helped normalize it a bit in pop culture. Erin from Derry Girls has an unusually rare name.
• Colleen has only once broken into the top two hundred names in Ireland itself. ^note  In 1992 it peaked at 197th. Since then, never more than twenty babies have been named Colleen any year, usually far less. Not too surprising, since it just means "girl". It only became popular after the 1920s among the Irish diasporas.
• And, speaking of Irish names, "Caitlin" is simply the Anglicized version of Caitlín (note the difference in the second "i"), the Irish spelling of "Kathleen" (which itself is a variant of "Catherine"). In Irish, it's pronounced, roughly, "Kathleen", making its modern English-language usage a mispronunciation.
• Oscar, although dating back to an ancient Irish name meaning "friend of deer", was almost unknown until Charles XIV's son became King Oscar I of Sweden in 1844.
  • There also was an Old English Oscar, usually interpreted as equivalent to the German name Ansgar — both meaning "god-spear" — and part of a whole group of Germanic names beginning "Os-", notably Osmond, Oswald, and Oswin. Saint Ansgar or Oscar (801-865), the first archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen, was known as the "apostle of the North". The name Oscar was popularized in the late 18th century by James MacPherson's literary forgery Ossian, which was where French General Bernadotte, later King Charles XIV of Sweden, got the idea to name his son Oscar.
• Victoria was unheard of as a girl's name in English-speaking countries before it became clear that Princess Victoria was going to inherit the crown of Britain. When she was given it, she was expected to remain an obscure minor princess: it was a (deliberate) Who Names Their Kid "Dude"? choice.
  • Her mother Victoria was from Germany. Victoria and its variants were in use in continental Europe long before. (The name itself is of ancient Roman origin.)
  • It's also commonly forgotten that Victoria did not become her name until she assumed the throne and she chose to drop her first name, Alexandrina.
• Cedric, which is often seen as a quintessentially Saxon name, did not exist before Walter Scott used it in Ivanhoe in 1820. Scott seems to have misspelled the actual Old English name Cerdic (most famously a sixth-century king of Wessex), creating the far more famous modern version of the name. He also changed the pronunciation - Cerdic was pronounced "Cherditch", but Scott's version invented "Sedrick". Despite that, several Medieval characters, like the Sofia the First character Sorcerer Cedric, still use the name.
• The Russian name Svetlana may seem to have an ancient feel to it... and was first used in 1802, in an all but forgotten poem by Alexander Vostokov. It was popularized by Vasily Zhukovsky in 1813. Even after that, the popularity was limited by the fact that the church didn't recognize it until 1943 — by then, of course, few cared. Still, everyone did care that Joseph Stalin had a daughter named Svetlana.
• "Selina", too. Bill Finger used the name as early as 1940 as the "real name" of Catwoman, but only in the past few decades has it seemed to have acquired anything resembling mainstream popularity — and now commonly as "Selena" (to reflect the Spanish spelling), in a nod to singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez and actress-singer Selena Gomez. Interestingly, the name is also Older Than They Think: it has its roots in the very ancient Greek term selene, meaning "moon."
• Jennifer did not become a popular name outside Cornwall until the 20th century. It is a variation of Guinevere (as in King Arthur's wife), but long considered just a local peculiarity. George Bernard Shaw used it in his 1906 play The Doctor's Dilemma, but it was still considered weird enough back then that the character with this name must explain its origin. The fame of Jennifer Jones (born Phyllis Lee Isley) in The '40s boosted its prominence, and it finally became common thanks to the tragic heroine of the 1970 novel and film Love Story.
• The name Brooke, which originated as an Anglo-Norman surname, didn’t gain popularity as a first name until the late 1940s. Like the name Jennifer, it only gained recognition through association with someone famous, namely socialite Brooke Astor (whose birth name was Roberta Brooke Russell), and later became trendy due to the fame of entertainer and socialite Brooke Shields.
• Pamela was invented in the late 16th century by Sir Philip Sidney in Old Arcadia but remained unknown until Richardson's mid-18th-century novel. Contrary to the usual pronunciation, Sidney had originally intended for the name to be pronounced: "pa-MELL-uh".
• Vanessa was invented by Jonathan Swift in the early 18th century as a nickname for his pupil Esther Vanhomrigh ("Van" from her last name and "essa" as a diminutive for "Esther"). It was first seen in print in 1726 but didn't become popular until the 20th century, though.
• Samantha seems ancient (perhaps Greek, Celtic, or Hebrew). It's actually a British coinage first recorded in 1633, basically just a fanciful Distaff Counterpart to Samuel (it's a combination of "Sam" and anthos, meaning flower in Greek), and it became more common in America than England in the 1700s, though it didn't really take off in popularity in either country until Bewitched started airing.
• Jessica appears to have been invented by William Shakespeare for The Merchant of Venice. Since the character was a Jewish girl in Venice, he may have intended it as an Italian-sounding version of the name Iscah from the Book of Genesis, which was rendered "Iesca" in the most popular English Bible translation at the time the play was written. He's also credited with inventing Miranda for The Tempest, though that name has more clear Latin roots (meaning "admirable").
• The name "Karen" was rarely heard outside of Denmark (it's a diminutive Danish form of "Katherine") before the 1930s, when it gained a surge of popularity in the English-speaking world, due to the influence of actress Karen Morley (which was the Stage Name of Mildred Linton).
• Surnames in the English-speaking world originated in The High Middle Ages, but they didn't really become entrenched as family names until the very end of The Renaissance. Before then, English surnames often resembled Old Norse surnaming practices, with a heavy number of patronymics ([x]-son) that changed with each generation. There were also many bynames based on personal characteristics or places where the person lived. Women would sometimes have distinct surnames they kept even after they were married; there existed surnames like Rogerdaughter, and some common English occupational surnames are actually female-gendered versions of standard occupational nouns (Baxter for baker, Brewster for brewer, Webster for weaver). Men would sometimes have surnames taken from their mother (Madison means "son of Maud"). And individuals could hold more than one surname at the same time and change surnames over their lifetime. William Johnson might also be called William Brown based on his hair color but might prefer to be called William Brewer after he began making ale for a living. The standardized practice of having the surname of the father bestowed on his children, and a woman taking her husband's surname, was finalized around 1700 when the practice of "coverture", meaning that a man assumed all legal rights and obligations for his wife upon marriage, became a bedrock of English common law.
• Madison was virtually non-existent as a female first name until the 1984 film Splash. In the film, the name's strangeness is even a plot point; the protagonist is a mermaid with no exposure to human culture who picks it from a street sign.
• Mallory was just an Anglo-Norman surname until 1982 when Justine Bateman's performance as Mallory Keaton on Family Ties turned it into a trendy American name for girls overnight. The few known uses of Mallory as a given name before then was as a male name. At the peak of the show's run, it ranked among the top one hundred names for girls.
• Wendy didn't exist as a common name until J.M. Barrie made it up for Peter Pan in 1904, although it was occasionally used as a nickname for "Gwendolyn" beforehand. Barrie got it from the daughter of one of his friends, who called Barrie "my fwendy-wendy" as a child.
• The name Eric was almost unknown in the English-speaking world until Eric, or, Little by Little, an 1844 School Story by Frederic W. Farrar. (Erich, Erik etc. had always been popular among German speakers and Scandinavians, but the first notable English Eric was probably the singer Eric Thorne (1862–1922), and that was short for his real name, Frederick. That name came to popularity in English with Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707–1751)).
• Lexi, as a nickname for Alexis or Alexandra, then later as a standalone name for girls, only emerged in The '90s; it didn't crack the top 1000 in the Social Security annual name list until 1993.
• Scarlett first came to prominence with the publication of Gone with the Wind in 1936 but was only infrequently seen in Real Life until The New '10s, when it became a hugely popular name for girls, seemingly inspired by Scarlett Johansson.
• Olivia initially rose to fame with Olivia de Havilland’s breakthrough role in the 1935 movie Captain Blood. However, it gained even more popularity over four decades later through the success of Olivia Newton-John in the movie Grease.

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