Names like Kelly and Ashley were once boys' names — and girls drove nearly every switch

There are a few names I think are being confused. Jan, short for Janice is a female name, but Jan in Central / Eastern Europe as a form of John is masculine. Jean the female name and Jean the french male name are different.

My biggest WTF on this (as a foreigner) was the late Lindsey Graham. I always knew Lindsey/Lindsay as a female name.

Either way, peeking through the list, seems to me names which end with a vowel are usually feminine. However, there's a caveat: names end up shortened, and over time even those get shortened.

'Brit', 'Britney' for 'Brittany'.

'Gerry' or 'Geri' or 'Ger' for 'Gareth' (Dutch variant: 'Gerrit'),

'Pat', 'Patty' for 'Patrick', 'Patricia'.

'Pen', 'Penny' for 'Penelope'

'Ash' for 'Ashley'.

'Tash' or 'Tasha' for 'Natasha', 'Nata(s)cha' (a variant of Nathan/Nathaniel?)

'Toni', 'Tony', or 'Ton' for 'Antonia', 'Anton', or 'Antonius'.

Skimming through the quick examples I came up with, one thing stands out: if it ends with an 'a', feminine. I believe this stems from Latin? It also appears Brittany is a very British example, whereas say 'Tony' stems from a Catholic background. People with that background get very traditional names, but they're always practically shortened. Annoyingly, you'd have to mention your complete name on say a form, but otherwise you get a wider choice since you have like three names, and they're relatively long so more variety to pick from.

There was a guy at my school named Hilary who got awful abuse for it. Always wondered why parents would do such a thing to a child.

This article misleads by presenting these transitions as from "popular boys name" to "popular girls name", when in fact most of the cases here are from "rare name, sometimes used for boys and sometimes girls" to "suddenly trendy for girls".

To take Ashley as an example. This name suddenly started ramping up in popularity in the 60s. In 1970, there were 927 girls named Ashley in the U.S. It peaked at 54,856 in 1987.

It became notably more popular for boys at roughly the same time! The peak of M Ashley was in 1980, at 746. (Note: it's also very likely that these numbers are wrong. The SSA data also has 56 male Marys in 1980, which is likely the result of coding error.)

Meanwhile, in 1945, solidly in the time period when the article would like you believe that Ashley was solidly a boys name, there were 57 M Ashleys and 10 F. 1950 was 55 M/15 F. Prior to 1960, a "good" year for Ashley was around 100 total babies, with some split of both M and F.

To me, a more honest interpretation of this data is that Ashley was a somewhat unisex, but mostly just very uncommon, name that suddenly became trendy in the 1960s, especially for girls but also for boys.

It did fall in popularity much faster for boys than girls, perhaps as it became to be perceived as feminine due to its popularity for girls. But note that even today, Ashley is still used as a boys name! There were 69 M Ashleys in 2009 and 27 M Ashleys in 2025 (by which point the prevalence of coding error is much lower -- M Mary has fal […]

But Jean (English name, like Jeannie) and Jean (French form of John) are entirely different names, with different pronunciations, that happen to share the same spelling.

I feel like a lot of these can be tied to one famous person with the name causing the gender to flip.

The shift that seems the weirdest to me is "Anne" shifting from a male name to a female name. This happened long before the US was formed, but it always surprises me when I read about a renaissance soldier named Anne.

In Poland it used to be quite common to give boys "Maria" as a second name. I think it's a Catholic thing.

Interesting data. Nightmare color scale for the colorblind.