Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa
by grobie12 on Monday November 02, 2026 @03:29PM
(#50343252)
As someone who doesn't have kids yet and so doesn't meet a lot of new borns I found the names on this super surprising. Our intuition around names is almsot exclusively formed by our own age group and people older than us. For many of this it was shocking to me that within my lifetime (I'm under 30) names had gone from almost exclusively male to exclusively female. I guess this is why you end up with so many parents all choosing the same small set of names each believing they are choosing a unique name because they've never met an adult with that name.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa
by gregates on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @06:57AM
(#50350891)
I was asked once how I felt about the fact that the name I chose for my daughter was primarily used (in America) by Asian immigrants. I noted that they had this impression only because they grew up at the nadir of the name's popularity. It's much more popular now (still not top 50) which means that by the time my daughter is grown up, it will have lost that association, to whatever extent it briefly obtained.
This is also what happened to all those male Ashleys in the 70s. People picked up on the name's trendiness, but didn't initially realize it was vastly more popular for girls and would soon be seen as feminine.