Pop Culture and Name Trends

Investigating the Name Charity

Summary

I found that the name Charity increased rapidly in use for girls born in the United States from 1968 to 1975. I was unable to find an explanation for this increase until I came across another rapid increase over that same time frame for the name Chastity. Since both names are Puritan virtue names that start and end with the same sounds, the increase for Charity can be explained by lockstep individualism, where similar sounding names increase at the same time.

Name Investigations

One of my favorite things to do is look up names of famous people or fictional characters from well known pieces of media and examine if their name increased in popularity. Sometimes this is easy. The names Romeo and Juliet increased with the releases of sucessful movie adaptations of Romeo and Juliet in 1968 and 1996. The name Winona has been increasing steadily since 2016, when the show Stranger Things released, staring actress Winona Ryder. Sometimes a name does not increase because of the reason I looked it up, but had an increase in a different year.

The data is taken from the Social Security Administration's Beyond the Top 1,000 data set. The data set contains individual text files for each year after 1879. Each text file lists every name that was registered for five or more babies that year, the associated sex, and the count.

Here, I will show how I figured out why the name Charity began increasing in 1969, a question that stumped me for months.

Babies Named Charity

Shown is a graph of the number of female babies named Charity by year in the United States. I originally looked this up because I was watching The Greatest Showman, a movie musical from 2017 that performed well at the box office, and I wondered if names in the movie had an impact. The protagonist's wife is named Charity, so I created the graph to see if there was an increase following the release of the movie. There wasn't, but I instead found a very sharp increase immediately following 1968.

I've looked at enough names to know when something "triggers" an increase, so I knew there had to be a celebrity, a character, or even an event that inspired so many parents to give the name Charity over the following years, peaking in 1975. From 1968 to 1975, Charity increased 1,134.78% for girls. I knew that the triggering event must have occurred in late 1968 or early to mid 1969.

Number of girls in the United States given the name Charity from 1880 to 2024

Name Origin

Charity is a Puritan virtue name, referring to the action of giving out of love or generosity. When I looked up the origin of the name, I found that it has become common in parts of Africa influenced by English, such as Kenya or Ghana. Historically, the name has been associated with Saint Charity and her sisters, Faith and Hope, who were martyred.

Investigating Triggers

The first thing I did was look for any obvious connections by reading through the Wikipedia of people named Charity, which is often my first step. I could rule out anyone who wasn't alive in 1968, either dying before or being born after. There were only four people I investigated on the first go:

- Charity Brown -- a Canadian singer whose first album was released in 1971
- Charity Adams Earley -- the first African American woman to become an officer, during WWII
- Charity Taylor -- an English doctor during WWII
- Charity Waciuma -- Kenyan writer who published Daughter of Mumbi in 1969

I could immediately rule out Adams Earley and Taylor, since the time they did what makes them noteworthy was earlier than 1968/69. Brown and Waciuma were the most promising, but after digging a little deeper on the internet, I couldn't find enough to be certain of a connection. Neither seemed to be "famous" enough in the United States at the time.

I filed this name under "Unknown Trigger" and moved on to other investigations.

Investigating the Name Chastity

A few months later, I was suddenly curious about Puritan virtue names and looking at which ones were still in use. I found a list on a name website and looked up each one in the US name data, writing down the ones that had sharp increases in popularity. One of those names was Chastity. Prior to 1969, there was no data for Chastity, meaning that from 1880 to 1968 there were no more than five in any year. Shown is the graph of the number of girls named Chastity.

Number of girls in the United States given the name Chastity from 1880 to 2024

Investigating Triggers

Again, I knew this increase was too sharp and too sudden to not have been triggered by someone or something. From 1968-1974, the peak, the name increased 74,800%. A quick Google of "Chastity 1969" revealed that Sonny and Cher, the iconic singing duo of the sixties, named their child, born in March of 1969, Chastity. I added this name to my collection under "Increases" and moved on.

Sometime after that, I returned to finding a trigger for the name Charity. I spent another hour or so searching online for something to explain it, refusing to believe the name increased that quickly on its own. Suddenly, I remembered something I learned from a YouTube video months earlier. The video -- which I believe was from @etymologynerd -- explained that after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, other names beginning with K increased because when one name becomes popular, other similar sounding names become popular. This can easily be seen with the Aidan/Brayden/Hayden/Jaden trend and is called lockstep individualism, when parents try to chose a unique name but all choose the same names anyway.

Once I remembered this video, the explanation for Charity increasing suddenly seemed so simple. Charity and Chastity are both Puritan virtue names. They both start and end with the same sounds. Charity is only more popular because it was uncommonly used as a name prior to 1969, whereas Chastity wasn't. Therefore, there was no person or character named Charity, the name simply increased because it sounds like Chastity.

Charity and Chastity

As is seen in the graph, both Charity and Chastity began increasing in use for girls following 1968. Charity became more popular, likely because it had been used on between 50-100 girls per year for decades prior. Both names increase together, peak around the same year, and also decrease together, with both having a slight resurgence around 1999. When both names are graphed together, the link between their popularities becomes clear.

Number of girls in the United States given the names Charity and Chastity from 1880 to 2024

Conclusion

Charity is probably one of my favorite name investigations because of how difficult it was to find the connection. Most names that increase quickly have an obvious trigger or at least one that can be explained by a quick internet search. Explaining Charity took an understanding of onomastics, social trends, and pop culture.

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