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A comment on US boy names that became girl names and vice versa.

Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by bregma on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:07AM (#50350975)
It has been my experience as a long-time worker with youth groups that the recent trend for gen-alpha girls names is to bring back Victorian-era names (Blanche, Pearl, Gertrude, etc) and for boys new names have been coined indicating testosterone or aggression (Trucker, Hunter, Killer, Fleshrenderer -- okay, maybe I made that last one up). One year every boy in my youth group seemed to be named Jaxon or Finnigan though.

There's definitely a new gendered name dichotomy going on. We'll have to wait a few years before these trends start showing up in the census data though.

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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by A_D_E_P_T on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:33AM (#50351235)
You don't need to wait that long. Data from 2025 is already available. Hunter isn't in the top 100, and Trucker and Killer (lol) aren't in the top 1000. Those are two exceptionally weird and unfortunate names.

> https://www.whattoexpect.com/baby-names/list/top-baby-names-...

Mateo aside, the top 20 could have been pulled from 1840. Tradition still reigns, and Victorian-era names for boys are the rule rather than the exception.

Names that end with -er are in general quite rare, though it's true that Archer is in the top 100, and Gunner is somewhere around #500.

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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by tylervigen on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:36AM (#50351252)
In the US, I think the most reliable source for name trends is the Social Security Administration [0], not the US Census. Relevant because they summarize baby names every year, so you don’t have to wait.

[0] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/index.html

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