Boy names for girls...in 1880!

General Name Discussion
1

I was just browsing through the U.S. social security names list from 1880, looking for old fashioned names for another thread, and I came across something I thought was interesting: Apparently the use of all-boy names for girls isn’t a new phenomenon. All these were in the top 1000 for girls in 1880:

[name]Francis[/name]
[name]John[/name]
[name]William[/name]
[name]Artie[/name]
[name]George[/name]
[name]James[/name]
[name]Donnie[/name]
[name]Ira[/name]
[name]Jimmie[/name]
[name]Cecil[/name]
[name]Louie[/name]
[name]Clyde[/name]
[name]Frank[/name]
[name]Eddie[/name]
[name]Charles[/name]
[name]Henry[/name]
[name]Robert[/name]
[name]Claude[/name]
[name]Joseph[/name]
[name]Fred[/name]
[name]Ray[/name]
[name]Thomas[/name]
[name]Walter[/name]
[name]Clarence[/name]
[name]Clifford[/name]
[name]Harry[/name]
[name]Leo[/name]
[name]Arthur[/name]
[name]Edgar[/name]
[name]Joe[/name]
[name]Louis[/name]
[name]Archie[/name]
[name]Dave[/name]
[name]David[/name]
[name]Dean[/name]
[name]Earl[/name]
[name]Edward[/name]

Thank goodness these weren’t taken over by the girls, as seems to be the case with many boy names used for girls today. Could you imagine if female Edwards and Freds were running rampant? :wink:

2

[name]Cecil[/name], [name]Francis[/name] and [name]Ira[/name] are the only ones I’d ever consider for a girl! The rest are terrible on girls! Haha

3

I think most of those are actually SSA errors in recording their gender; they were more prevalent historically (especially in the pre-computer era). You’ll see plenty of these mistakes in the opposite direction as well - clearly female names on males.

4

Oh you’re right! [name]Just[/name] looked at the male side and there sure are a lot of clearly female names. [name]Kinda[/name] wondering now what happened there…if the handwriting was just so bad on the birth records that it couldn’t be distinguished whether it said M or F? Hmmm…