1950s Baby Names

15,671 names were given to children in the United States between 1950 and 1959, 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

#769
Mindy Mindy has no source of its own — it shortens Melinda, whose second half is transparent and whose first half nobody has explained, so the name inherits half a meaning.
4,322 in the 1950s
#770
Ada Ada is a girl's name with two origins. In Germanic it is a short form of names beginning with adal, noble; in Hebrew, Adah means "adornment" and belongs to two women in Genesis.
4,306 in the 1950s
#771
Ervin
4,295 in the 1950s
#772
Jeannine Jeannine is a girl's name meaning God is gracious, a French diminutive of Jeanne.
4,285 in the 1950s
#773
Jeanie
4,284 in the 1950s
#774
Jerri
4,279 in the 1950s
#775
Sondra
4,269 in the 1950s
#776
Ava Ava is a girl's name with several proposed origins rather than one settled root.
4,237 in the 1950s
#777
Mack Mack means son of, and on its own it is only half a name — the Gaelic mac is a prefix, so using it alone is like naming a child Junior with nothing in front of it.
4,228 in the 1950s
#778
Sammie
4,220 in the 1950s
#779
Isabel Isabel is a girl's name of Hebrew origin meaning "God is my oath."
4,215 in the 1950s
#780
Kimberley Kimberley is named for a woman — the English place name behind it is Cyneburg's clearing, and Cyneburg was a seventh-century Mercian princess, so the name reaches modern use through her land rather than a man's.
4,215 in the 1950s
#781
Arturo Arturo means bear, probably — but Arthur is one of the unsolved names, with a Celtic word for bear and a Roman family name both proposed and neither established.
4,214 in the 1950s
#782
Claudette Claudette means little lame one, and it is an uncomplimentary name that a Roman dynasty made prestigious — the Claudii held the emperorship, and the byname's original sense stopped mattering.
4,197 in the 1950s
#783
Myrna
4,186 in the 1950s
#784
Merle Merle means blackbird, and it is one of the mixed names on this site — 33 percent of recorded births are female, and it is reviving.
4,182 in the 1950s
#785
Rufus Rufus means red-haired, and it named a king by his complexion — William II of England was called Rufus for his ruddy face, and he died with an arrow in him in the New Forest.
4,177 in the 1950s
#786
Marta
4,163 in the 1950s
#787
Violet Violet is a girl's name of Latin origin meaning "purple," taken from viola, the Latin word for the purple flower.
4,153 in the 1950s
#788
Wilbur Wilbur ranks 579th in England and Wales against 3,956th in the United States, so a name most people think of as thoroughly American is now used more than six times more readily in England.
4,150 in the 1950s
#789
Luanne
4,148 in the 1950s
#790
Reba
4,138 in the 1950s
#791
Chuck
4,113 in the 1950s
#792
Roseann
4,113 in the 1950s
#793
Jaime Jaime is 41 percent female on record, one of the most divided names on this site — Spanish reads it as James, and English hears it as a spelling of Jamie.
4,102 in the 1950s
#794
Ellis Ellis is a name of Hebrew origin meaning "the Lord is my God."
4,076 in the 1950s
#795
Alfredo Alfredo means counsel of the elves, and the elves were taken seriously — Anglo-Saxon naming treated them as beings whose advice was worth invoking, not as decoration for a children's story.
4,072 in the 1950s
#796
Marcy
4,068 in the 1950s
#797
Grady Grady means noble, and it comes from a byname rather than a rank — the Irish grádha describes someone held in esteem, which is a reputation earned rather than a title inherited.
4,060 in the 1950s
#798
Freddy Freddy is far stronger in England than in America — 328th in England and Wales on 135 births against 1,422nd in the United States on 127, despite the two countries being nowhere near comparable in size.
4,037 in the 1950s
#799
Alonzo Alonzo is the Spanish descendant of a Visigothic name, and it is rising — 511th in the United States, 1,186th in Canada, 1,324th in France and 1,714th in England and Wales, having peaked as recently as 2022, which is unusual for a name birth records carry from 1880.
4,003 in the 1950s
#800
Sallie Sallie means princess, and it reached English through a sound swap — Sarah became Sally the way Mary became Molly, with the r softening to an l in ordinary speech.
3,996 in the 1950s
#801
Tammie
3,990 in the 1950s
#802
Travis Travis is a boy's name from an occupational surname meaning a toll collector, one who worked at a crossing.
3,988 in the 1950s
#803
Rafael Rafael is a boy's name of Hebrew origin meaning "God heals."
3,974 in the 1950s
#804
Bret
3,963 in the 1950s
#805
Dena
3,956 in the 1950s
#806
Owen Owen is a boy's name of Welsh origin, the anglicized form of Owain.
3,956 in the 1950s
#807
Dona
3,943 in the 1950s
#808
Ana Ana is a girl's name of Hebrew origin meaning "favor" or "grace," and it is the form of Anna used across Spanish, Portuguese and Slavic Europe.
3,942 in the 1950s
#809
Gertrude Gertrude is a girl's name from Germanic elements meaning spear-strength, and its saint is patron of cats — a modern attribution that no medieval source supports.
3,936 in the 1950s
#810
Lesley Lesley is the Scottish spelling and Scotland proves it — a peak of 341 births there in 1974, far above what the country's size would predict against an American high of 981.
3,934 in the 1950s
#811
Erma Erma is the only name in this group recorded in a single market across its whole history — every one of its 55,187 births is American, and it charts nowhere else in any year on record.
3,921 in the 1950s
#812
Gayla
3,917 in the 1950s
#813
Felicia Felicia means lucky, and the Latin felix meant fertile before it meant fortunate — the word originally described soil and livestock that produced well, and good fortune was a later extension of it.
3,902 in the 1950s
#814
Monty
3,881 in the 1950s
#815
Royce Royce is a boy's name from an English surname meaning "son of Roy" or "son of Rose."
3,879 in the 1950s
#816
Sheldon
3,845 in the 1950s

What Made a 1950s Name

Children in the United States were registered with it between 1950 and 1959. 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.