Data from the Social Security Administration show that the names Kobe and Gianna had the greatest increase in popularity of any names in the country in 2020; as Kobe boys increased from 499 to 1500 and Gianna girls from 3408 to 7826. Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna died in a helicopter crash on January 26 last year, one of the dramatic national news events eclipsed by the pandemic (George Floyd’s daughter, now 7 years old, is also named Gianna).
The Kobe count of 1500 was surpassed only in 2001, during his first run of NBA championships, but the number per 1000 births was higher in 2020. Here is the trend:
And the Gianna trend, with a similar increase off a much higher base. Gianna became the 12th most common name given to girls in 2020.
Other news from the pandemic year in naming
Besides Gianna, not much change in the top 20 names, by gender, as Olivia, Emma, Liam, and Noah continued their dominance. Most of the top 20 names declined in popularity last year.
Outside the top names, the biggest drop in percentage terms (among those with at least 1000 births) was Alexa, who fell another 36%, from 1995 to 1272. Alexa has had a historically catastrophic decline since Amazon gave the name to its robot shopping companion (discussed last year).
Finally, Mary remains dormant, with 2188 girls getting the name in 2020, a drop of 21 from 2209. I told the story of Mary going back to the Revolutionary War on this blog and in Enduring Bonds. Still ripe for a comeback (jinx). Here’s an updated Figure 1:
The Social Security Data and Stata code for this analysis is here under CC0 license: osf.io/m48qc/. Note SSA updates their denominators every year; I have a file of those in here too.
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This post was previously published on Family Inequality with a Creative Commons License.
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