Old-fashioned unisex names

Photo by Brett Meliti on Unsplash

Unisex names have historical roots — names like Frankie, Dana, Johnnie and Guadalupe show a past with a variety of gender-neutral styles.

Old-fashioned unisex names predominantly fall into three categories:

1. Nicknames as full names
2. Place names
3. Historical neutrals

Nicknames as full names

The most common unisex names of the 1880s through the 1950s are nicknames that might more commonly have been diminutives of full names.

Examples of the most common names include:

• Frankie: Frank, Francis, Franklin, Francisco, Frances, Francine, and Francesca
• Freddie: Frederick, Freda, and Frederica
• Jackie: Jack, Jack, and Jacqueline
• Jessie: Jesse and Jessica
• Johnnie: John, Jonathan; possibly Johanna
• Maxie: Maxine, Maxwell, and Maximilian
• Willie: Wilhelmina, Wilma, William, Willard and Wilson
• Tommie: Thomas and Thomasina

Modern equivalents include Charlie and Jaime.

Place names

A longstanding yet less common trend is place names as unisex. Several historical examples with regular use include:

• Guadalupe: an archipelago of islands in the Caribbean
• Paris: the capital of French and cultural destination
• Trinidad: a West Indies island; also the Spanish name for the Holy Trinity

Modern equivalents include Brighton, Dakota, and Milan.

Historical neutrals

Finally, there are several names that have a history of being gender-neutral, even if in decades since they have become more widely used for a single gender:

• Alva: through peaks and recent troughs, Alva has been a unisex name from the 1890s to the 1990s — a full century. In recent years, it has been given less frequently to boys.
• Dana: a gender-neutral name for a full half-century, it became a breakaway favorite for girls in the late 1950s and has remained that way ever since.
• Gail: prior to the 1930s, Gail and its counterparts Gale and Gayle was a gender-neutral name, being given in almost equal parts to boys and girls.
• Marion: in 1880, Marion was weighted ever so slightly toward boys. This quickly reversed, with a slough of girls born which vastly changed the gender ratio. After a spike peaking in the 1920s, births declined, and Marion regained gender-neutral status in the late 1960s — and has remained there ever since.
• Meredith: through the late 1930s, Meredith was a relatively uncommon yet gender-neutral name. While female births became increasingly common, male births with this name declined to the point of vanishing in 2012 — not to be seen since.

With the exception of Marion, the above listed names have since trended distinctly female despite decades of unisex use.

Will history repeat itself for today’s neutrals like Riley, Casey, Justice and Armani? Only time can tell.

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