1940s Baby Names
7,630 names were given to children in the United States between 1940 and 1949, ranked below by how many.
A name's place is its total across those ten years. Names that appear in only some of the decade say so, because a name recorded once is a different fact from one recorded every year.
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#6,650Lyna Lyna is a girl's name, a French respelling of Lina, which has both an Arabic sense of a young palm tree and a European use as a short form.55 in the 1940s 6 of 10 years
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#6,696Karine Karine peaked at 11,665 French births in 1972 — the largest single-year figure of any name in this group — and now ranks 7,381st.54 in the 1940s 8 of 10 years
What Made a 1940s Name
Children in the United States were registered with it between 1940 and 1949. A name's position here is how many of them were.
Why Some Names Only Cover Part of the Decade
A name that appears in three of the ten years either arrived partway through or faded out — and either is more interesting than the total on its own. The statistics offices do not publish names given to very few children in a year, so a gap can also mean the count dropped below the threshold rather than to nothing.
Where to Go Next
Open any name to see its full curve — most of these have a hundred and forty years of it. Or compare the ends of the same measurement: the most popular names now and the rarest.