1940s Baby Names

7,547 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.

All Girls Boys Unisex

Rankings for

#664
Natalie Natalie is a girl's name of Latin origin meaning "birthday of the Lord," from natalis.
4,129 in the 1940s
#666
Holly Holly is a girl's name of Old English origin taken from the tree, from holegn.
4,123 in the 1940s
#667
Gwen
4,119 in the 1940s
#671
Kristine Kristine means a follower of Christ, and it is the fourth spelling of this name to appear in our gap band — after Kristin, Kristen and Kristina, all four of them American-led rather than Scandinavian.
4,046 in the 1940s
#672
Olga Olga is a Norse name in Russian dress — Helga traveled east with the Varangians and became Olga, so the patron saint of Kyiv and Moscow carries a Scandinavian word meaning holy.
4,040 in the 1940s
#673
Mabel Mabel is a girl's name of Latin origin meaning "lovable."
4,025 in the 1940s
#674
Lenora
4,023 in the 1940s
#675
Blanche Blanche means white, and its revival is entirely French — 252nd in France on 220 births against 6874th in the United States.
4,022 in the 1940s
#677
Shelia Shelia is Cecilia with two letters swapped and four languages in between — Cecilia became the Irish Síle, Síle was written Sheila in English, and Sheila was misspelled into Shelia often enough to become its own name.
4,013 in the 1940s
#680
Adrienne Adrienne means from Hadria, an Italian town that also named the Adriatic Sea — so the name and the sea are both called after a small settlement whose own name is uncertain.
3,992 in the 1940s
#682
Tina Tina is a girl's name that serves as the tail end of several unrelated names — Christina, Martina, Valentina and Bettina — so its meaning depends entirely on which one a family had in mind.
3,971 in the 1940s
#684
Jayne
3,957 in the 1940s
#686
Ruthie
3,945 in the 1940s
#687
Judi
3,940 in the 1940s
#691
Lynette Lynette entered English through Tennyson, who reshaped a Welsh name for the Idylls of the King — Luned became Lynette, and the spelling he used is the one that survived.
3,913 in the 1940s
#693
Lorene Lorene reaches the laurel by the long way round — Laurentum was a town named for its bay trees, and the personal name says which town someone came from rather than which plant crowned them.
3,906 in the 1940s
#694
Sharyn
3,899 in the 1940s
#698
Gracie Gracie is a girl's name of Latin origin meaning "grace."
3,873 in the 1940s
#700
Winifred Winifred is two names that English collapsed into one — the Welsh Gwenfrewi and the Anglo-Saxon Winfrid, unrelated in every element, and our data marks the result reviving with England setting its peak this year.
3,855 in the 1940s
#701
Essie Essie shortens two names with nothing in common — Esther, whose root is probably Babylonian, and Estelle, which is the Latin for a star.
3,855 in the 1940s
#702
Roseann
3,853 in the 1940s
#706
Opal Opal means the gem, and it is the only major stone whose name may come from Sanskrit — upala, a precious stone, reaching Greek and Latin through the trade routes rather than from a European root.
3,803 in the 1940s
#707
Etta Etta is a girl's name of Germanic origin meaning "home ruler."
3,797 in the 1940s
#708
Ina
3,776 in the 1940s
#711
Melody Melody is a girl's name of Greek origin meaning "song" or "singing," from melodia.
3,757 in the 1940s
#713
Estella Estella means star, and Dickens chose the name deliberately — Great Expectations gives it to a girl raised to be beautiful and unreachable, which is what a star is.
3,742 in the 1940s
#716
Nettie Nettie is a suffix that became a name — it is the tail end of Antoinette, Jeanette and Annette, cut loose and used on its own, so it began as the part of a name that carried no meaning at all.
3,729 in the 1940s
#720
Isabel Isabel is a girl's name of Hebrew origin meaning "God is my oath."
3,694 in the 1940s
#721
Earlene
3,689 in the 1940s
#722
Meredith Meredith is a Welsh man's name that turned female in America — 95 percent of the births in our records are female, and the Welsh Maredudd it comes from was borne by princes of Deheubarth.
3,689 in the 1940s
#723
Diann
3,689 in the 1940s
#724
Jenny Jenny began as a pet form of Jane, not Jennifer — the two attached to each other only in the twentieth century, and Jennifer was almost unknown outside Cornwall before 1900.
3,689 in the 1940s
#728
Janette
3,618 in the 1940s
#730
Rena
3,590 in the 1940s
#732
Marilynn
3,569 in the 1940s
#733
Cathleen
3,541 in the 1940s
#736
Leah Leah is a girl's name of Hebrew origin whose meaning is disputed, most often given as "weary" but also linked to a word for wild cow.
3,495 in the 1940s
#737
Beverley
3,490 in the 1940s
#740
Dona
3,435 in the 1940s
#742
Willa Willa is a girl's name of Germanic origin meaning "resolute" or "will".
3,415 in the 1940s
#743
Pearlie
3,408 in the 1940s
#744
Josie Josie is a girl's name that began as a pet form of Josephine, and so means "he will add," inherited from the Hebrew Yosef.
3,404 in the 1940s
#745
Sherrie
3,389 in the 1940s
#746
Lela Lela means night on the Arabic reading, and that connects it to one of the oldest love stories in the world — Layla and Majnun, retold in Persian verse eight centuries ago.
3,362 in the 1940s
#747
Pam
3,357 in the 1940s
#748
Margarita Margarita means pearl, and it names both a cocktail and a pizza — the pizza for Queen Margherita of Italy, the drink by a route nobody has ever settled.
3,356 in the 1940s
#750
Dorthy
3,351 in the 1940s
#751
Kathie
3,313 in the 1940s

What made a 1940s name

Nothing about the sound of it. A name is on this page because children in the United States were registered with it between 1940 and 1949, and its position is simply how many. Every list of "1940s names" you will find elsewhere is somebody's sense of the period; this one is the register.

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.