Are Baby Names Getting Longer?

Nov 6, 2026 Abigail Adams, Editorial writer

Short answer: they were. Then they stopped — in 1989 — and they've been quietly getting shorter ever since.

We measured it the only honest way: every baby born in America in a given year, weighted by how many babies actually received each name, and averaged the letters. (A name given to 90,000 babies moves the average; a name given to five doesn't.) Here is the shape of a century.

Decade	Girls' average length	Boys' average length
1910s	5.76 letters	5.71 letters
1950s	5.83	5.68
1970s	6.10	5.85
1980s	6.32	5.98
1990s	6.36	5.97
2010s	6.00	5.77
2020s	5.87	5.67

The shortest names in history were the Baby Boomers'

The counterintuitive dip comes first. The shortest-named generation in our data isn't the distant past — it's the late 1950s. Girls' names bottomed out in 1959 at 5.73 letters; boys' names bottomed the same year at 5.60. That was the two-syllable snap era: Linda, Karen, Debra, Susan, Nancy for girls; James, Robert, Michael — and a wall of five- and six-letter standards — for boys. Mid-century America named fast.

Before that, names were middling: 1910's girls averaged 5.67 letters (the shortest single year for girls in the whole series — the Mary-and-Anna era), rising gently through the 1920s and 30s.

Then came the stretch: 1960 to 1989

From the 1959 floor, the average climbed for thirty straight years. Girls gained three-quarters of a letter, peaking in 1989 at 6.42 letters. Boys peaked the same year at 6.01. Those were the Jennifer-and-Jessica, Christopher-and-Alexander years: longer names, more syllables, more letters on the birth certificate.

The long-name share tells the same story. In the 1950s, just 13.1% of baby girls received a name of eight or more letters. By the 1980s it was 20.6% — one girl in five. Boys went from 3.3% to a peak of 11.3% in the 1990s.

And then, quietly, the shrink

No announcement was made, but the turn is unmistakable. Girls' average length has fallen from 6.42 (1989) to 5.87 in 2025 — back between the 1940s and 1950s level. Boys are at 5.66, statistically indistinguishable from their 1950s selves (5.68). The eight-plus-letter share for girls is back down to 13.2% in the 2020s — the 1950s figure, almost to the decimal.

Today's chart explains why. The top of the 2025 list runs short: Mia, Liam, Noah, Emma, Luna, Ezra. The modern taste isn't for longer names; it's for compact ones with open vowels. The long-name era turns out to have been an episode — roughly 1970 to 2000 — not a direction.

Our advice: if you're weighing a long name against a short one, know which way the wind is blowing. A Maximilian or an Evangeline born in 2026 will be the long name in a class of Mias and Leos — distinctive by length alone. A four-letter name, meanwhile, is the most crowded real estate in modern naming: short is where the competition is.

For the decade-by-decade charts behind this, see baby names by decade and the current most popular girl baby names 2025.