What's Your Name?

What's your name? Who named you? Who were you named after? What does your name mean? Is your name biblical? Do you share your name with a saint?

Every year, the U.S. Social Security Administration compiles a list of names that new parents gave their children that year, coming up with a top 10 and a top 20, and so on. The SSA just this week released the list of most popular names for 2012.

What is in a name? We all know that first names are meaningful and that parents choose them carefully. It is interesting to note how many parents choose biblical names or saints’ names whether they choose them for that reason or not.

Interestingly, more parents give their sons biblical or saints’ names than they give their daughters. Looking at the top twenty names for 2012, sixty percent of the boys’ names are also in the Bible: Jacob (1, most popular), Noah (4), Michael (8), Daniel (11), Matthew (12), Elijah (13), James (14), Benjamin (16), Joshua (17), Andrew (18), David (19), and Joseph (20). On the girls’ side, however, only two names are clearly biblical: Abigail (7) and Elizabeth (10). A little bit of research yields that Mia (8) is a nickname for Maria or Mary. Natalie (17) comes from the Italian word for Christ’s birth. Sophia (1) is the Greek word for Wisdom.

In the year that some of the current ninth grade students were born (1997), there were several biblical names in the top 10 of American boys’ names: Michael, Jacob, Matthew, Joshua, and Andrew. Fifty percent of the top 20 boys’ names in that year were biblical. For girls, however, things were a bit different. Only four names from the top 20 for girls in 1997—Sarah, Hannah, Elizabeth, Rachel,—are biblical.

What Is in a Name? | Ave Maria Press:

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