The baby names too popular to stay in fashion

IF YOUR daughter is one of four Emmas in her class at school, there is a good reason for it.

Much like the economy, children’s names go through a ‘boom and bust’ cycle, according to a study.

Girls’ names tend to be the most weird and wonderful, as Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter Apple and Jamie Oliver’s girl Petal Blossom suggest. But for both sexes rare names become fashionable, then get too popular and fade away in predictable cycles.

Researchers led by the University of Michigan in the US analysed children’s names over almost nine decades.

They found names rise most in popularity when they are most rare, belonging to around one in 10,000 babies. But when they become too popular, with around one in 100 children having a given name, they start to decline.

The trend can be seen in the female names Emma and Evelyn, which were hugely popular between 1880 and 1910, then became too common and were used less often, before coming back into fashion a few years ago.

Study leader Dr Mitchell Newberry, from the University of Michigan, said: ‘It appears that when a name becomes too popular, people want to find something totally different. We all seem to have the same aversion to common names and it’s not just driven by celebrity and films or music.

‘Britney Spears seems to have been part of a wave of Britneys when that name became popular.’ The study, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, analysed the names of around 245million people from US records dating back to 1935.

When a name was rare, used for about one in 10,000 children, it rose in popularity, with an extra 1.4 per cent of children being given it each following year.

But when a name hit its peak, with one in every 100 children having it, it started to decline, with 1.6 per cent fewer children being given the name each year afterwards.