12 Vintage Girl Names from the 1920s Making a Comeback
There's a 100-year rule in baby naming: names that were popular in your great-grandmother's day are far enough removed to feel fresh again. The 1920s names are right in the sweet spot, and a handful of them have come all the way back.
To make this list, a name had to be:
- Top 200 for US girls in the 1920s
- Dropped well below 500 for at least one decade between 1970 and 2000
- Back in the 2024 top 250
The result is a tight pack of 12 names — many of them now firmly in the modern top 100.
The comeback list
| Name | 1920s peak | Mid-century low | 2024 rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Violet | #77 | #734 | #15 |
| Hazel | #34 | #676 | #19 |
| Stella | #82 | #543 | #49 |
| Adeline | #176 | #805 | #58 |
| Eloise | #164 | #1,466 | #64 |
| Elsie | #51 | #848 | #155 |
| Olive | #151 | #3,677 | #171 |
| Rosalie | #170 | #784 | #177 |
| Ada | #136 | #667 | #193 |
| Lila | #175 | #751 | #207 |
| Mabel | #83 | #1,506 | #222 |
| Vera | #75 | #524 | #226 |
The most dramatic recoveries
- Violet went from #77 in the 1920s, all the way down to #734 in its 1990 low, and is now the #15 girl name in the US. That's a swing of over 700 places back into the very top of the chart.
- Hazel dropped to #676 and is now #19 — a similar reclamation. Both names benefit from the same aesthetic (short, vowel-rich, color-tied, vintage-coded).
- Olive's low point was #3,677 — nearly out of the dataset entirely. It's back at #171 today, propelled in part by its proximity to chart-topper Olivia.
Why these and not others?
Many 1920s names didn't come back. Gertrude, Mildred, Beatrice, and Doris all peaked in the same decade but have stayed out of the top 500 in 2024. The names that returned tend to share three properties:
- Short or visually compact: Ada, Lila, Vera, Olive, Hazel.
- Soft endings — "-ie", "-a", "-ose": Elsie, Stella, Rosalie, Eloise.
- Nature or virtue ties: Violet, Olive, Hazel, Vera ("truth"), Stella ("star").
If you're hunting for the next 1920s name to break out, those filters are a decent starting place. Check the 1920s decade page for the full top 100 of the era, or use the Picker with an "antique" filter to browse hundreds more.
Data: U.S. Social Security Administration 1880–2024. We took the best (lowest) rank in each name's 1920–1929 window for "1920s peak", the worst rank in 1970–2000 for "mid-century low", and the 2024 SSA rank. Names with no rank in a given window are reported as "unranked".