"Tristan" now feminine given name

Jonathan Lighter wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM
Thu Feb 23 20:31:50 UTC 2006


You mean to say that by a commodius vicus of recirculation, Allison is again a feminine name. Or still, as the case may be.

  "Alysoun" is the name of the female lead in the "The Miller'sTale."  I've known several female "Allisons." (That was in the last century, however.)

  And I once knew a female dental hygienist named "Johnnie."

  JL

James Callan <james.callan at COMCAST.NET> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: James Callan
Subject: Re: "Tristan" now feminine given name
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It's a longstanding trend for parents to give girls names that used to be masculine -- my wife, Allison, was named after her grandfather.

A good Web resource that discusses naming trends, rather than just spotting them, is the Baby Name Wizard: http://www.babynamewizard.com/blog/

There's an entry on the androgynous trend here (scroll down to the second post -- for some reason the direct link doesn't work): http://www.babynamewizard.com/blog/archive/2005_11_01_nameblog-archive.html

It doesn't discuss Tristan itself, but if you plug the name into the site's Java-based NameVoyager, you'll see that it's never been a top-1000 boy's name in the US, hit the girl's list at #819 in the 1970s, shot to #218 in the 1980s, #148 in the 1990s, and was #116 in 2004. That translates to over 800 babies per million born in the US being given the name.

James Callan
neologasm.com

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