The royal baby's name is already super popular in the U.S. for exactly the reason you think

By Fusion Staff  |  May 5, 2015 | 10:41am
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Did Prince William and Kate Middleton name the new royal baby after Charlotte from Sex and the City? To answer the question that literally nobody asked: No, they did not.

Princess Charlotte Elizabeth Diana, whose name was revealed Monday morning, owes her given name to her grandfather, Prince Charles (and possibly the queen consort of King George III). The newborn’s middle names pay respect to her great-grandmother, the Queen, and her grandmother, the late Diana Spencer.

Case closed? Basically. But that won’t stop me from going off on this wholly unrelated tangent.

While tracking the popularity of “Charlotte” on both sides of the Atlantic over the years using babynamewizard.com, the U.S.’s Social Security Administration’s website, and the U.K.’s Office of National Statistics’ site, I noticed an interesting trend in the American data.

The name began declining in use in the 1950s, and by 1999 it had hit an all-time low at number 307. But starting in the year 2000, that trend had reversed; Charlotte was back in the top-100 baby names for girls by 2008, and in 2013 it had reached number 11.

And I wondered: Why did everyone go Char crazy after Y2K?

At the risk of losing that Professional Baby Name-ologist license I don’t have, I’m going to go ahead and place the blame on Kristin Davis’s Sex and the City character, Charlotte York Goldenblatt. Within two years of the HBO series’ 1998 premiere, the name was already more popular in the U.S.

The three other Sex and the City protagonists’ names—Carrie, Samantha, and Miranda—didn’t get the same bump.

While Samantha was hugely popular in the ’90s, it has since fallen down to number 29. Miranda declined in popularity not long after the show first aired as well (rude), and Carrie hasn’t cracked the 1,000 most popular names for baby girls since 2008.

Oh, and in case anyone’s wondering, Shayla, the name Charlotte had planned to name her daughter before suburban expat Laney Berlin stole it out from under her, never really took off in the U.S.; it peaked at number 296 in 2001, and by 2013 it was only the 672nd most popular baby name for girls.

I guess that means Laney didn’t ruin the name by stealing it. You hear that, Char? You could have named your daughter Shayla after all.

Bad at filling out bios seeks same.

 
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