Every year, the Friday preceding Mother’s Day is an important day for anyone interested in the most popular baby names in the United States. That’s the day when the U.S. Social Security Administration posts to its website the data for the previous calendar year showing the most popular baby names in the country.Â
It’s like the Academy Awards for the baby names crowd, only not as much fun.
This year, there was hardly any change in the top ten names for both boys and girls. In fact, the top girl’s name in the United States, for the eleventh boring year in a row, is Emily. (Nothing wrong with Emily, but number one for over a decade? Whatever happened to creative baby naming?). And for boys, Jacob was the top baby name for the eighth year in a row. Yawn.
Here is a useful roundup of the top baby names of 2006.
With the exception of Reese Witherspoon’s “Ava,” which made an impressive showing at number 5, and possibly Gwen Stefani’s “Kingston,” debuting in the top 1000 at number 941, I don’t see much crossover from the world of celebrity baby names to the real world. That shouldn’t surprise anyone, since celebrity baby names are on the leading edge of our culture, except in cases where the name has fallen clear over the edge. (Moxie Crimefighter comes to mind, as does Kal-El, Pilot Inspektor, and Apple).
Considering it was 2006, one might have expected the names Shiloh or Suri to crack the top 1000, but there was no sign of either.
If anything, some celebrity baby names seem to reflect the real world, rather than vice versa. Kevin Costner’s new baby boy, Cayden, is a good example. Cayden is an increasingly popular name in the “aden” category, including all kinds of rhyming variants such as Jayden, Braden, Aiden, Kayden, etc. Costner, in fact, is quite the trendy baby namer — his son’s middle name Wyatt, also chosen by Sheryl Crow, is also an increasingly popular name.
The name Sebastian, picked for her son by actress Kim Fields, is also growing more popular, as is Marcia Cross’s “Savannah” and T.V .Psychic John Edwards’s “Olivia.”
But perhaps the biggest name to move between Hollywood and the rest of us is the name Addison, which happens to be the name of Kate Walsh’s character on ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy. In the 2006 rankings, the name Addison was the fastest-rising name in the top 100, rocketing from number 106 to number 27.
Is it life imitating art, or art imitating life? Or is it all just one big blur?
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UPDATE: August 20, 2008. News just hitting the internet that Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale’s son has been born — and 
born April 18, 2006, edged out Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, daughter of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, born May 27, as the most popular celebrity baby name that was searched for on Yahoo! during the past year.
