Baby Names
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7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Baby Names trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Few things date a person as neatly as a first name. Every generation of parents believes it is choosing freely, yet the official charts show whole classrooms sharing the same handful of favourites, and those favourites turning over almost on schedule. A name that filled the maternity wards of one decade can sound like a grandparent's two generations later. This quiz follows the most popular American baby names decade by decade, from the Victorian era onwards, using the official national rankings. It also covers where names come from: the novels, plays, films and television shows that launched them, the stars who picked eyebrow-raising ones for their own children, and the countries where officials can refuse a name outright. It suits expectant parents hunting for ideas, baby shower hosts who need a game, and anyone who has wondered why half their class answered to the same name. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still leaves you with a story.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which girls' name barely existed until a mermaid took it from a New York street sign in the 1984 film Splash?
Madison
Madison was meant as a joke: the mermaid reads it off a Madison Avenue sign and is told it is not a real name, yet by the 2000s it ranked second among US girls' names.
Q 02Which girls' name reached No. 1 in the US in 1947, the year a song named for a lawyer's baby daughter charted?
Linda
Linda was the one-year-old daughter of songwriter Jack Lawrence's attorney, Lee Eastman, and she grew up to become Linda McCartney, wife of Beatle Paul.
Q 03Which girls' name was No. 1 in the US for the 2010s, having also ranked third back in the 1880s?
Emma
Emma spent the years between out of fashion, missing the decade top 200 for the 1950s through the 1980s before climbing all the way back to the summit.
Q 04Which girls' name took off in Britain thanks to the heroine of J. M. Barrie's 1904 play Peter Pan?
Wendy
Wendy is said to come from 'fwendy-wendy', the nickname a friend's small daughter, Margaret Henley, gave Barrie because she could not pronounce 'friendy'.
Q 05Which girls' name entered the US top 1,000 in 2001 after a rock singer chose it for his daughter?
Nevaeh
Nevaeh is 'heaven' in reverse, and it was almost unknown until Sonny Sandoval of the band P.O.D. gave it to his daughter in 2000.
Q 06Which boys' name has been America's No. 1 most often in the last 100 years, topping the list 44 times?
Michael
Michael took over in 1954 and was beaten only once before 1999, a startling rise for a name that ranked no higher than 35th in any decade before the 1940s.
Q 07Which girls' name, first seen in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, was America's No. 1 for the 1980s and 1990s?
Jessica
Jessica is Shylock's daughter in the play, and Shakespeare may have adapted the name from the biblical Iscah, spelled Iesca in Bibles of his day.
Q 08Which brand name did a French court refuse to allow as a baby girl's first name?
Nutella
Nutella would expose the girl to mockery, the judge ruled, so he renamed her Ella; another couple's choice of Fraise, French for strawberry, was turned down too.
Q 09Which girls' name leapt to second place in the US in 1935 at the height of a curly-haired child star's fame?
Shirley
Shirley rode Shirley Temple's fame to its peak, having been mainly a surname until Charlotte Brontë gave it to the heroine of an 1849 novel.
Q 10Which girls' name was America's most popular in every single decade from the 1880s through the 1950s?
Mary
Mary was so dominant that in the 1880s it was given more than twice as often as runner-up Anna, and it was still the runner-up for the 1960s as a whole.
Q 11Which girls' name, a Cornish form of Guinevere, was the most popular in the US for the 1970s?
Jennifer
Jennifer was little used outside Cornwall until George Bernard Shaw gave it to a character in a 1906 play, and it went on to hold the US top spot every year from 1970 to 1984.
Q 12Which boys' name was No. 1 in the US every year from 1999 to 2012, a run that began years before Twilight?
Jacob
Jacob had already led the list for six years when the first Twilight novel, with a Jacob of its own, appeared in 2005; back in the 1880s the name ranked 49th.
Q 13Which top-ten US girls' name of the 1950s and 1960s later became slang for an entitled complainer?
Karen
Karen ranked eighth for the 1950s and fourth for the 1960s, and it had already slipped out of the top 200 before the meme about demanding women spread in the late 2010s.
Q 21Which girls' name led the US list every year from 1996 to 2007, making it the top pick of the 2000s?
Emily
Emily had ranked outside the top 100 in every decade from the 1900s to the 1960s, despite sharing a name with poet Dickinson and novelist Brontë.
Q 22Which boys' name led every US decade from the 1880s to the 1910s and stayed in the top five until the 1970s?
John
John lost the 1920s title by barely 12,000 babies out of more than 11 million boys born that decade.
Q 23Which name, a man's in Gone with the Wind, was America's most popular girls' name in 1991 and 1992?
Ashley
Ashley began as an English surname meaning 'ash tree meadow', and in America it was given to more boys than girls until 1964.
Q 14Which Oscar-winning actress and her rock-star husband named their first child Apple in 2004?
Gwyneth Paltrow
Gwyneth Paltrow and Coldplay singer Chris Martin went biblical two years later, naming their son Moses.
Q 15Which country's judge made a girl a ward of court to change her name, Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii?
New Zealand
New Zealand registrars had already blocked Keenan Got Lucy and Yeah Detroit, the judge noted in 2008, yet had let Number 16 Bus Shelter and Midnight Chardonnay through.
Q 16Which boys' name topped the US list in 1960, the only break in a rival's reign from 1954 to 1998?
David
David edged ahead for that single year, then spent the rest of the 1960s in second or third place and finished the decade as its runner-up.
Q 17Which girls' name, second in the US for the 1920s, comes from the Greek for 'gift of God'?
Dorothy
Dorothy uses the same two Greek roots as Theodore in reverse order, and it sat in America's top ten from the 1900s, the decade The Wonderful Wizard of Oz came out, through the 1930s.
Q 18Which girls' name ended a run stretching back to the 1880s by becoming America's most popular for the 1960s?
Lisa
Lisa had ranked only 37th for the 1950s, then held the yearly top spot from 1962 to 1969 before sliding to sixth for the 1970s.
Q 19Which biblical boys' name was America's most popular for the 2010s, after ranking only 20th in the 2000s?
Noah
Noah took the yearly top spot in 2013 and held it for four years, although it had sat outside the top 200 in every decade from the 1890s to the 1980s.
Q 20Which nickname beginning with P is a traditional pet form of the girls' name Margaret?
Peggy
Peggy grew out of Meggy, an older pet form, just as Polly began as a variant of Molly.
Q 24Which girls' name, the full first name of Twilight heroine Bella Swan, was No. 1 in the US in 2009 and 2010?
Isabella
Isabella is a Latinate form of Isabel, itself a version of Elizabeth, and it had never reached the US top 200 for a whole decade until the 1990s.
Q 25Which boys' name, missing from every decade's US top 200 before the 2000s, took over as America's No. 1 in 2017?
Liam
Liam is an Irish short form of William that has no recorded use before the 17th century and caught on in Ireland itself only around 1900.
Q 26Which name did Beyoncé and Jay-Z give their first daughter in 2012 and later try to trademark?
Blue Ivy
Blue Ivy's cries on her father's song 'Glory', released two days after her birth, made her the youngest person credited on a Billboard chart up to then.
Q 27Which island nation has a Naming Committee that must approve any first name not already on its official register?
Iceland
Iceland's committee left a former mayor of Reykjavík unable to name his daughter Camilla; she became Kamilla, because the letter C is not in the national alphabet.
Q 28Which girls' name leapt up the US charts after the 1964 sitcom Bewitched gave it to a suburban witch?
Samantha
Samantha had fallen out of the top 1,000 before the show began, returned in 1964 and jumped to 179th the following year.
Q 29Which girls' name, popularised by a character in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, became America's No. 1 in 2019?
Olivia
Olivia was not Shakespeare's invention, though he made it fashionable; in America it did not reach the top 200 for any decade until the 1980s.
Q 30Which boys' name, third in every decade from the 1880s to the 1920s, was America's No. 1 for the 1940s and 1950s?
James
James was given to more than 4.5 million American boys between 1925 and 2024, more than any other name, even though it slipped as low as 19th along the way.