On Winston, Karen and Khaleesi

How names stopped being universal

While I briefly toyed with inflicting ‘Athelstan’ on my son, one name we both considered more seriously was Winston. During my wife’s first pregnancy we read that Billie Piper had given her son that name and wondered if it was due a comeback. We were both open to the idea, I consider Churchill a great hero, but out popped a girl, and by the time we had a son five years later we’d both cooled on Winston.

Besides which, Billie Piper and her then husband Laurence Fox didn’t start a trend with the name. I’m reminded of President Eisenhower’s comments to Peregrine Worsthorne when the young English reporter told him that the first Mayflower child born on American soil had also been a Peregrine: ‘Well, sonny, that name sure didn’t catch on.’ 

Winston was never a common name but the political implications will probably deter more people from reviving it. Likewise, Nigel is now extinct in Britain, and the name is surely too right-coded to come back. It’s also one of those names, like Ian, which today seems bizarrely unsuited to a baby. Gary has likewise disappeared in Britain, having originally grown in popularity due to Hollywood screen star Gary Cooper; I’m not sure why it declined, but I imagine that Gary Glitter probably didn’t help. In the US, Karen and Chad have recently died out, presumably because both come with too much baggage, and Alexa has also gone out of fashion, most likely because of Amazon.

In Britain there are no more Garys or Nigels, but in 2022 there were 28 newborns called Khaleesi, 26 Theons and 5 Daenerys, among the many Game of Thrones-inspired names. While Khaleesi means ‘queen’ in Dothraki, Theon is at least ancient Greek so any child embarrassed by the name can claim his parents had a great interest in the classics.

I’m too conservative to opt for something as unusual as Winston, let alone Khaleesi, but I am going against the grain, since the past few decades have been marked by four great naming trends: a move towards greater variety, a decline in Christian influence, an increase in non-western names and, perhaps most pronounced of all, more marked class distinctions.

At the start of 20th century, most given names came either from the Bible or from Greek, Roman or Germanic traditions; children were named after saints, family members or historical heroes. As recently as 1900, one in four girls in Britain were named Mary; by 2008 Mary was only the 183^rd most popular girl’s name in England and Wales (below three older variants, the Latin Maria and the Arabic/Aramaic Maryam and Mariam) and just ahead of Keeley, Honey, Alesha and Rhianna.