10 baby names U.S. parents are dropping — and why

A name rarely disappears because it stopped sounding good. It disappears because something attached itself to it — a criminal case, a hurricane, a political career, a joke that would not die — and parents decided they did not want their child carrying that association for 80 years. The Social Security Administration's baby name records reach back to births in 1880, and they capture two very different kinds of decline. One is slow: a name drifts from common to dated across 30 or 40 years as it comes to belong to grandparents rather than classmates. The other is abrupt, and it is the more revealing of the two. A name can go from rising to nearly gone inside a five-year stretch, with the turn showing up in birth records within a year or two of the event behind it.

The fastest-declining baby names in the U.S. almost always trace back to a moment that can be dated. Isis was gaining ground among American girls until 2014, when a militant group claimed the word for itself. Katrina was in steady use until August 2005. Harvey ran into a hurricane and a Hollywood scandal within two months of each other in 2017. Jared, Monica and Hillary each wound up tied to one person who held the news for months or for decades. Karen and Chad fell without a scandal at all, undone instead by an internet stereotype that turned each name into shorthand for a personality type.

Adolf sits at the far end of the scale, dropped in the 1940s and never picked back up in the 80 years since. Bruce sits at the opposite end, a name that faded on fashion alone, with no villain attached to it. The 10 names that follow cover that full range, and each entry explains the mechanism behind the fall — why a few names recover part of their standing, why others never do, and what the timing of each drop says about how fast American parents respond to what is in the news.

Illustration: Quartz

The collapse of Karen as a baby name was driven by a meme rather than a crime or a disaster. The name sat in the top 10 for U.S. girls in the 1960s and now goes to a tiny fraction of the newborns it once did, with the sharpest part of the slide coming after 2018.

That was the year the stereotype hardened into the form most people now recognize: a white, middle-aged woman who demands to speak to a manager, polices her neighbors, or calls the police over a small dispute. The label moved through Twitter $TWTR, Reddit $RDDT, and TikTok, then gained force during the pandemic, when footage of shoppers confronting store employees over mask rules spread widely. Merriam-Webster added Karen to its Words We're Watching feature, which tracks usage that has not yet met the criteria for a dictionary entry.

A meme works differently from a scandal. No trial concludes it and no news cycle closes it out. Each new viral video reactivates the association, so the name has no route back to neutral. Parents naming a daughter today are not responding to one episode from 2018 — they are responding to a label still in everyday use.

The decline started well before the joke. Karen is a Danish form of Katherine, and it peaked with women born in the 1940s and 1950s, then lost ground to Jennifer and Jessica, and later to Emma and Olivia. The meme did not begin the fall. It turned a gradual retirement into something closer to a ban.

Adults carry the cost as well. Women named Karen have been teased at work, asked to go by a middle name, or had strangers make the joke to their face. Most of the other names on this list attach to a single event, so the people who already have them are not treated as the punchline. Karen arrives with the joke built in, and nothing currently in circulation looks likely to remove it.

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Isis was a modest but climbing choice for American girls in the early 2010s. It then fell out of the Social Security Administration's top 1,000 within a few years of the militant group seizing territory across Iraq and Syria in 2014. Few names leave that list so quickly.

The appeal before 2014 was straightforward. Isis is the ancient Egyptian goddess tied to motherhood, healing and magic. The sound also sat comfortably beside Isla, Isabella and Iris, which were climbing the rankings over the same stretch. The name carried thousands of years of history and no negative association.

Saturation coverage of the group starting in mid-2014 ended that. The acronym ran in newspaper headlines, cable news chyrons and presidential statements for years on end. The name itself never shifted in meaning. It was overtaken by an unrelated organization that happened to share a transliteration, which is a different mechanism from a name slowly going out of style.

Two corporate rebrandings show how complete the problem became. The mobile payments venture backed by AT&T $T, Verizon $VZ and T-Mobile $TMUS launched as Isis Mobile Wallet and became Softcard in 2014, with the company pointing to the unwanted association. Isis Pharmaceuticals, a California biotech founded in 1989, became Ionis Pharmaceuticals at the end of 2015. Companies with legal departments and marketing budgets judged the name unusable, and parents reached the same verdict without anyone coordinating it.

Families who had already chosen it faced a harder problem. A girl born in 2012 or 2013 entered a school system where the reference was unavoidable. Some families kept the name, some moved it into the middle slot, where it drew less attention, and some went to court to change it.

A decade on, Isis has not returned to the SSA rankings in any meaningful way. That sets it apart from names attached to a scandal that eventually left the news cycle, where usage can partly recover once the coverage stops.

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Harvey picked up two unrelated negative associations inside a single autumn. Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas on Aug. 25, 2017, and flooded much of Houston and the Gulf Coast, killing dozens of people. Six weeks later, the first sexual assault and harassment allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein were published.

Those reports, in The New York Times and The New Yorker in October 2017, set off the #MeToo movement and kept Weinstein's first name in news coverage for years. Criminal trials in New York and California extended the cycle well beyond the original reporting. Two high-profile negative events landing on one name in the same calendar year is rare.

Harvey had spent most of the preceding century as a mild, slightly old-fashioned American name, closer in register to Howard or Walter than to anything in fashion. Part of that softness came from the 1950 film "Harvey," adapted from Mary Chase's play, in which James Stewart plays a man whose closest companion is an invisible rabbit of that name, more than six feet tall. For two generations, that was the first reference most Americans reached for.

The storm and the scandal displaced it. The World Meteorological Organization struck Harvey from its rotating list of Atlantic hurricane names in 2018, replacing it with Harold. American parents moved in the same direction on a faster timeline.

The scale of the shift is easier to see outside the U.S., where Harvey has long been a more common pick. In England and Wales, it sat inside the top 100 boys' names for much of the 2010s before sliding down the rankings. U.S. birth records show the name working from a smaller base, which makes the drop less dramatic in raw counts but no less clear in direction. Harvey has not returned to mainstream use for American newborns since 2017.

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Katrina's decline is the cleanest before-and-after case in modern American naming. The name was in steady use for girls through the 1980s and 1990s, and its appearance in U.S. birth records fell away within months of Hurricane Katrina making landfall on the Gulf Coast in late August 2005. The storm killed more than 1,800 people and flooded roughly 80% of New Orleans.

The scale of the disaster explains the speed of the response. This was not a storm that stayed regional news. Coverage of the levee failures, the Superdome, and the federal relief effort ran for weeks, then came back every August on the anniversary. Parents picking names in 2006 were working against a backdrop in which the word Katrina pointed to a catastrophe with a national death toll before it pointed to a girl.

The association is also unusually direct. There is no behavior to interpret, no disputed account of what happened, no individual whose reputation might be repaired years later. A storm took the name, and the record is fixed. That leaves nothing for the name to recover from.

Meteorologists reached a parallel conclusion through a formal process. The World Meteorological Organization retires Atlantic hurricane names when a storm proves deadly or destructive enough that reusing the name would be inappropriate, and Katrina was struck from the six-year rotation in 2006. Parents arrived at the same verdict with no coordinating body at all.

Two decades later, Katrina has not come back in any meaningful way. Its usage falls almost vertically from 2006 rather than tapering across a decade, which is the shape a name takes when it is only going out of fashion. Retired storm names are not rare — Andrew and Camille are both still recognizable — but few arrived with Katrina's death toll and sustained coverage. In American English the word now reads as a reference to the storm first and a given name second.

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Monica was a common choice for American girls through the 1970s and 1980s, and its use slid after January 1998, when the affair between President Bill Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky became national news. Coverage ran for more than a year, through the Starr investigation, Clinton's impeachment that December and his Senate acquittal in February 1999.

The shape of this decline differs from the vertical drops that follow disasters. Monica slipped across several years rather than collapsing inside a single birth cycle, which tracks how the scandal arrived — in installments, through testimony, legal filings and televised hearings rather than on one catastrophic news day.

The association also attached to a private citizen rather than to an institution or an event. Lewinsky was 24 when the story broke, and late-night monologues and tabloid covers treated her as a punchline for years afterward. Parents weighing the name in 1999 were not avoiding a crime or a death toll. They were avoiding a joke they had already heard too many times.

That distinction shaped what came next. Monica remains in use in the U.S., which separates it from Isis, a name that dropped off the government's top 1,000 list altogether. A scandal built around one person tends to loosen its hold on a name faster than a mass-casualty event does, and Monica settled at a lower but durable level of use instead of vanishing.

Two forces acted on the name at the same time, which complicates any clean reading of the numbers. Apart from the scandal, American naming taste was moving away from the Latinate girls' names that carried the 1970s and 1980s — Monica, Veronica, Angela — and toward revived vintage choices and softer, vowel-heavy ones. Monica would have lost ground in the 2000s in any case. The scandal stripped away whatever cushion a gradual fade might have offered and accelerated a decline that fashion had already begun.

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Jared lost its most visible namesake in 2015, when Subway pitchman Jared Fogle pleaded guilty to federal child pornography charges and to traveling to engage in illicit sex with minors. A federal judge sentenced him that November to more than 15 years in prison. The name's slide in U.S. birth records steepened in the years that followed.

Fogle was tied to the name in a way few public figures are. Subway built roughly 15 years of advertising around his weight-loss story, and the commercials called him by his first name rather than his surname. For much of the 2000s, Jared worked almost as a brand asset, a single word that stood in for the whole campaign. That made the association hard to peel away from the name once the criminal case broke — harder than it would have been for a figure known mainly by last name.

The name was not at its peak when the charges surfaced. Jared sat inside the top 100 for American boys through much of the 1990s and had already been easing down the list for years as parents shifted toward other sounds. The 2015 case appears to have turned a gradual fade into a faster exit, with the drop continuing through the rest of the decade rather than leveling off.

Timing limited who the fallout reached. Boys named Jared in the 1990s and 2000s already carried the name, and families rarely revisit that decision once a birth certificate is filed. The effect landed instead on expectant parents building shortlists after the summer of 2015, for whom the name now arrived attached to a nationally covered conviction.

No competing explanation fits the sequence as neatly. Jared carried no earlier stigma, no hurricane shared the name, and no polarizing politician claimed it. The case fits a recurring pattern in American naming: one person's conviction, covered nationally for months, can strip an ordinary name of its neutrality and keep it suppressed well after the coverage stops.

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Adolf is the most complete and most durable abandonment of a name in American history. The name had an ordinary presence in the U.S. through the early 20th century, carried largely by German and Jewish immigrant families. It has not come back in the 80 years since the war ended, and there is no sign of a partial recovery or a generational revival.

The Social Security Administration's records, which run back to 1880, capture the collapse. Adolf and Adolph, the more common American spelling, both turn up in the agency's early annual counts. Both thin out through the 1930s, as Hitler consolidated power after his appointment as chancellor in January 1933. By the war years, they had effectively disappeared. Nothing in the data since resembles the slow fade of a name that simply went out of fashion.

The name was unremarkable in American public life beforehand. Adolph Ochs bought The New York Times in 1896 and ran it until his death in 1935. Adolph Zukor was a founder of Paramount $PARA Pictures. Adolph Coors started the Colorado brewery that still carries his surname. To their contemporaries, none of those first names read as strange.

What sets Adolf apart from the scandal-driven declines elsewhere on this list is the absence of any route back. Names attached to a disgraced individual tend to settle at a lower level once the coverage ends and the person fades from view. Hitler never faded from view, and the association is with genocide rather than personal misconduct. That puts the name in a category of its own.

Picking the name today reads as a deliberate statement. In 2008, a New Jersey supermarket refused to decorate a birthday cake for a three-year-old boy whose parents had named him Adolf Hitler Campbell. The story drew national coverage because the choice was understood as intentional. In Germany, where Adolf was a standard given name for centuries, it fell out of use after 1945 and has not returned there either.

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Chad was already fading before the internet gave it a second reason to disappear. The name peaked among American boys in the early 1970s, lost ground through the 1990s and 2000s as short midcentury names fell from fashion, then picked up a meme identity in the 2010s that closed off any revival.

The online Chad describes a type rather than a person: a conventionally good-looking, physically confident, socially dominant young man, usually drawn as unreflective. The archetype started in fringe forum communities, where it was paired with a female counterpart named Stacy, and spread through the "virgin vs. Chad" image format that circulated widely around 2017. After that, the word stopped working purely as a name.

Tone is what separates Chad from other meme-damaged names. The label mocks, but not only that — it often carries envy or approval, and "gigachad" functions as a compliment. That mixed charge explains the shape of the decline. There was no cliff, no single week when parents struck the name from their lists. It has drifted down steadily instead, the usual pattern when a stereotype is embarrassing rather than disqualifying.

Chad also competes with two unrelated meanings. It is the name of a Central African country, which keeps the word in news coverage in a context that has nothing to do with people. And in November 2000, "hanging chad" entered American vocabulary during the Florida recount, when punch-card ballots left small paper fragments — chads — partly attached to the card. For months, the most common use of the word in U.S. news concerned ballot debris.

Chad shows how cultural meaning accumulates. The name did not fall because of one event with a date attached to it. It lost ground to fashion first, then collected a joke, a country and an election-law term along the way, until too much clung to the name for it to read as a blank slate on a birth certificate.

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Hillary is the clearest case on this list of a name dropped for political reasons rather than criminal or tragic ones. It was climbing through the 1980s, then reversed after Bill Clinton's 1992 election made Hillary Clinton one of the most visible and most argued-over figures in American public life.

The turn shows up in birth records almost at once. Her tenure as first lady began in January 1993, and the decline registered among girls born that same year, a one-year fall steep enough to stand out in Social Security Administration records.

Nothing about the name itself had changed. It still traces to the Latin hilaris, meaning cheerful, and it still carried a link to Sir Edmund Hillary, the New Zealand climber who reached the summit of Mount Everest with Tenzing Norgay in 1953.

What separates this case from Monica or Jared is the absence of wrongdoing. No crime, no disaster and no disgrace attached to the name — only partisan argument. Parents picking a name in 1993 were weighing an association with a figure the country was actively fighting about, and a name that functions as a political marker narrows its own appeal on both sides of that fight.

Duration is the other distinguishing feature. Hillary Clinton stayed in national politics for more than two decades after 1993 — eight years as first lady, eight as a senator from New York, a 2008 presidential campaign, four years as secretary of state and a second presidential run in 2016. Names tied to one storm or one scandal eventually drift out of active memory. This one never got a quiet stretch in which it might have reset.

A rival cultural reference did not rescue it. Hilary Duff became a major teen star in the early 2000s on Disney $DIS Channel's Lizzie McGuire, but she spells her name with one L, and use of the two-L version did not rebound in any meaningful way. Hillary has stayed far below its pre-1993 level since.