Name Predictions: Honesty

You may expect this to be a post about how honest I am in my predictions.  It isn’t, amusing as the thought may be.  This is about the name Honesty, which I expect to enter the top 1000 in the 2015 set for the very first time. 

Honesty is an older and rarer virtue name, which is a potential boost in her favor.  Other ancient Puritan appellations like Mercy and Temperance have become popular in recent years.  Grace, Hope, and Faith are classics; little to say there. 

Honesty was given to 253 baby girls in 2014.  The name that ranked at the bottom of the top 1000, Kai, was given to 262 girls.  I remember thinking back after the 2013 list that  Emmeline and Clementine had risen so close to the bottom that they’d probably make their entries (or rather, reentries) the next year, which they did! 

Indeed, Honesty has been increasing in usage fairly steadily since her first appearance in the data back in the 1970s.  The fact that there’s around 250 of them means that on average 5 were born in every state in 2014.  Chances are you or your children will run into one on the playground at some point.

There’s another consideration that leads me to believe this will be a top 1000 name.  When a name starts to become really popular, a lot of spelling variations will begin to pop up.  Truthfully, I don’t know how many spellings of this word-name there currently are within the data-set.  My perusal of the extremely rare names for this past week’s posts has led to an encounter with “Ahonesty,” used 11 times that year.  It takes a second to realize how that’s pronounced, I know.  Actually, I’m not even sure I initially knew what name it was.  The juxtaposition of the ‘a’ made me think it was a separate syllable – “A-honesty.”  I’ve seen “Amiracle” (82 uses) but grammatically and pronunciation-wise that is much more intuitive than Ahonesty.  Other spellings of Honesty within the set include Honesti (56 uses), Aunesty (15), Aonesty (9), Onesty (8), Honestee (7), Honestii (7), Aunesti (5), Honestie (5), and Onesti (5).  There may yet be others.