The names Peter and Paul are often linked. The names sound the same. The two most well-known saints spread the Gospel and were martyred around the same time. According to the Lorraine Bracco character in Goodfellas, if you went to an Italian wedding, every other cousin was a Peter or a Paul. And many of the candy commercials during prime-time cartoon holiday specials in the 1970s and '80s advertised treats from the Peter Paul candy company (now part of Hershey).So how do these names stack up, based on NameVoyager, in terms of popularity?
Don't let the size of the graphs fool you, for the scale is different. In Peter's best recent decade, the name appeared in about 2,500 boys per million, a rank of 39. (In the 1880s the name ranked slightly higher but at a smaller rate.) The name enjoyed a double-digit rank, even as its rate declined, until 2003 (NameVoyager counts the 1990s as a full decade then begins individual years in 2003), when it hit 148. It's been declining ever since, and was ranked 183 in 2008.
Our friend Paul was actually more popular, enjoying a top-20 rank from the turn of the 20th century through the 1960s, hitting a peak rank of 14 from the 10s through the 30s and a high rate of about 6,250 Pauls for every million boys in the 1960s.Paul's fall has been much steeper since then. Between the 1960s and 1970s, the Paul rate dropped by a full third, and continued to plummet until it flattened out a bit more recently and sits at 155.
These are both classic, standard names that will continue to see use by parents who either don't want to tag their kid with a super-trendy name, or who wish to name their progeny after another relative.
After all, there are a lot of Uncle Peters and Uncle Pauls out there. Read more...
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