1960s Baby Names

10,954 names were given to children in the United States between 1960 and 1969, 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

#1,009
Johnna
2,907 in the 1960s
#1,010
Shana
2,905 in the 1960s
#1,011
Blanca
2,901 in the 1960s
#1,014
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.
2,874 in the 1960s
#1,015
Penelope Penelope is a girl's name of Greek origin, borne in Homer's Odyssey by the wife of Odysseus, who held off suitors for twenty years by weaving a shroud she unpicked each night.
2,871 in the 1960s
#1,016
Lola Lola is a girl's name of Spanish origin meaning "sorrows."
2,864 in the 1960s
#1,017
Tania Tania descends from a Sabine name nobody can translate, and Shakespeare's Titania is a different word — that one comes from the Titans, so the two are unrelated despite constant confusion.
2,864 in the 1960s
#1,023
Jeanie
2,830 in the 1960s
#1,025
Dixie Dixie names the American South and nobody knows why — the leading account is a French ten-dollar note printed dix in Louisiana, and the rival is the Mason-Dixon line.
2,817 in the 1960s
#1,026
Ursula
2,810 in the 1960s
#1,027
Rosalyn
2,808 in the 1960s
#1,028
Cindi
2,805 in the 1960s
#1,034
Jocelyn Jocelyn began as a man's name for a Germanic tribe — the Gauts — and turned female in twentieth-century America. About 90 percent of recorded births are now female.
2,765 in the 1960s
#1,035
Silvia
2,750 in the 1960s
#1,036
Deneen
2,748 in the 1960s
#1,037
Elsa Elsa is a girl's name of Hebrew origin meaning "God is my oath," a German short form of Elisabeth.
2,746 in the 1960s
#1,039
Blair Blair is a name of Scottish Gaelic origin meaning "plain" or "field."
2,733 in the 1960s
#1,040
Viola Viola means violet, and it names the flower, the instrument and a Shakespeare heroine from the same Latin root.
2,732 in the 1960s
#1,041
Freda Freda means peace, and it is a fragment of several longer names — Winifred, Frederica and Alfreda all shorten to it, so which one a Freda descends from usually cannot be recovered.
2,732 in the 1960s
#1,044
Agnes Agnes is a girl's name from the Greek for pure, and the reason its saint is shown with a lamb is a Latin pun — agnus, lamb, sounds like the Greek hagnos but is a completely different word.
2,714 in the 1960s
#1,048
Deloris
2,695 in the 1960s
#1,049
Liza
2,694 in the 1960s
#1,050
Janna
2,694 in the 1960s
#1,056
Danita
2,680 in the 1960s
#1,060
Pearl Pearl is a girl's name taken from the gem, and it charts in all seven markets.
2,662 in the 1960s
#1,061
Eunice Eunice means good victory, and she is named in the New Testament as Timothy's mother — one of very few women whose faith Paul credits by name, alongside her own mother Lois.
2,662 in the 1960s
#1,062
Rosanne
2,661 in the 1960s
#1,067
Letitia
2,645 in the 1960s
#1,069
Jacquline
2,632 in the 1960s
#1,070
Mattie Mattie serves two entirely unrelated names — Martha, which is Aramaic for a lady, and Matilda, which is Germanic for might in battle.
2,631 in the 1960s
#1,071
Myrna
2,630 in the 1960s
#1,076
Kathie
2,618 in the 1960s
#1,077
Eve Eve is a girl's name of Hebrew origin meaning "living one," the name given to the first woman in Genesis.
2,609 in the 1960s
#1,078
Sharron
2,609 in the 1960s
#1,079
Leisa
2,604 in the 1960s
#1,080
Diann
2,603 in the 1960s
#1,082
Bessie Bessie is a girl's name meaning God is my oath, a pet form of Elizabeth.
2,592 in the 1960s
#1,083
Hilary
2,577 in the 1960s
#1,088
Serena Serena has the most evenly spread ranking on this site — Scotland 298th, Ireland 310th, the United States 325th, France 330th and England and Wales 381st, five markets inside 83 places of each other.
2,568 in the 1960s
#1,089
Simone Simone is a girl's name meaning he has heard, the French feminine of Simon.
2,566 in the 1960s
#1,091
Elsie Elsie is a girl's name that began as a Scottish short form of Elspeth, itself a Scottish form of Elizabeth.
2,564 in the 1960s
#1,092
Lucia Lucia is a girl's name of Latin origin meaning "light," the feminine of Lucius from lux.
2,552 in the 1960s
#1,093
Genevieve Genevieve is a girl's name of Gaulish origin whose meaning is not settled.
2,546 in the 1960s
#1,094
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.
2,545 in the 1960s
#1,096
Janell
2,537 in the 1960s
#1,097
Selena Selena means the moon, and its curve has a shape we see nowhere else — American births went 918 in 1994 to 3,840 in 1995, the year Selena Quintanilla was killed on 31 March, then fell back to 2,296 the next year.
2,535 in the 1960s
#1,098
Brigitte Brigitte is a girl's name from an Irish goddess whose name means the exalted one, and she is the clearest case in Europe of a pagan deity becoming a Christian saint largely intact.
2,531 in the 1960s
#1,099
Roslyn
2,530 in the 1960s

What Made a 1960s Name

Children in the United States were registered with it between 1960 and 1969. 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.