Alison/Allison

[pinkysmith.livejournal.com]

I feel like this is becoming a theme with me but it's not intentional.  On BabyNames.com there's an article by a name named Allison about his name, it's significance and the "battle" he had with his partner over giving their son the same name.  Just thought it was really interesting, especially the reason why Allison became a popular name for females.

http://babynames.com/features/guestauthor.php

Comments

[sandtree.livejournal.com]

That's funny... the only person I know of named Keats is a girl.

The article isn't completely accurate. The baby names book from the '30s gives the wrong meanings for Alison and Allison. They don't mean the same thing. As far as all the research I've ever seen suggests, they're completely unrelated. Alison started as a nickname for Alice, which means 'noble kind', whereas Allison was always a surname, probably from Allen or Ellis (so basically a variant of Ellison).

The soap opera thing is interesting, and I have no doubt that it could have influenced the popularity of the name. Even today you can see how TV shows make the popularity of certain names explode. However, although Allison did become more popular for girls after the show debuted, it was already being exlusively used for girls years before that.

According to the data on behindthename.com, Allison was being used only for boys until 1946, when it suddenly made the top 1000 for girls, and was actually more popular for girls than for boys. After 1946, it completely disappeared from the boys list, and began to steadily climb in popularity for girls. By the time the TV show arrived, Allison was already #181 on the girls list, and its climb remained steady after that. There doesn't appear to be any significantly big jump in its popularity after 1964.