Stylish Names With Staying Power

Updated Thu Sep 05 2024

How do you pick a name that has a lot of style but isn’t in danger of becoming too popular?

That’s the kind of baby name a lot of parents are seeking. A name that’s in the Top 1000 but not on its way to the Top 10. A name that sounds cool and contemporary but that you’re not going to hear everywhere in a few years, but that also isn’t fading from fashion.

To find these golden names, you have to look beyond their absolute rank to their trajectory over time. What’s important is not whether they rank in the 100s or the 700s now, but whether they’ve held that position for ten or more years.

Many of the best names in this elite group were climbing the popularity ladder a decade or more ago and then for whatever reason leveled off — and stayed leveled off. Some of these names got so hot so fast that parents pulled back hard. Like Yogi Berra said, That place is so crowded nobody goes there anymore.

Oscar is a prime example. Oscar flirted with the Top 100 for about 15 years, from the early nineties till the late aughts.

And then it softened, dropping into the 200s where it seems to have found a new more sustainable level of popularity. There were about 1700 baby boys named Oscar in the US last year, around half as many as were given the name at the height of its popularity in 2008.

Oscar still sounds both classic and cool. Is it the edgiest name in the database? Not by a long shot, but it’s no Oliver either. Name your baby boy Oscar now, and you can feel secure that you’ve picked a name that’s going to remain quirky in a mainstream kind of way.

The names on this list all carry the same quantifiable stability. They are stylish enough to have climbed the popularity ladder for years. But rather than going viral the ways names like Luna and Theo have, they’ve settled into a steady level of popularity somewhere beyond the Top 100 but still in the Top 1000.

We looked for names that have maintained the same popularity sweet spot for at least a decade. We are confident that over the coming years, you are unlikely to hear these names too often, yet they’re unlikely to sound dated or weird.

Think of them as sweet spot names in the sweetest of spots.

Most Stable Names of the 21st Century

Looking for more names with the same kind of steady style?

To calculate lasting popularity from a different direction, we looked at names that have moved 15 or fewer places in the rankings from the year 2000 until now. Here’s that list:

About the Author

Pamela Redmond

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Pamela Redmond is the cocreator and CEO of Nameberry and Baby Name DNA. The coauthor of ten groundbreaking books on names, Redmond is an internationally-recognized baby name expert, quoted and published widely in such media outlets as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Today Show, CNN, and the BBC. She has written about baby names for The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, and People.

Redmond is also a New York Times bestselling novelist whose books include Younger, the basis for the hit television show, and its sequel, Older. She has three new books in the works.

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