The End of Mary and John: Why Parents Worldwide Are Ditching Common Names

The world’s newborns are becoming harder to name-check. In Germany, unique names—those given to only one child in a city each year—have surged since the 1890s. Across the Atlantic, America’s baby Marys and Johns have been in freefall for over a century. And in Japan, parents are taking common Chinese characters and reading them in increasingly uncommon ways, creating names that look familiar but sound utterly novel.

It’s happening everywhere researchers have looked. France, the UK, China, Indonesia. Seven nations spanning three continents, four cultural zones, and 220 years of naming data all point to the same pattern: common names are dying out, and uncommon ones are taking over.

The shift shows up differently depending on where you look. In the US, the share of babies receiving one of the top 10 most popular names has plummeted since 1880, when government records began. What held steady for decades started dropping in the 1950s and hasn’t stopped since. By 2007, barely 10 per cent of American babies got a top-10 name, compared with roughly a third back in 1950.

France tells a similar story, but over an even longer stretch. Between 1800 and 2019, the proportion of French babies named with one of the year’s most popular choices dropped from around 30 per cent to under 5 per cent. The revolution wasn’t just in politics, it seems.

In Japan, the pattern’s more subtle but perhaps more revealing. Parents there increasingly give babies common Chinese characters but pronounce them uncommonly, a uniquely Japanese workaround that wasn’t possible, say, in Indonesia or Germany. Between 2004 and 2018, uncommon name pronunciations rose steadily even as the characters themselves stayed popular. It’s rather like everyone naming their child “John” but insisting it’s pronounced “Shawn” or “Zhon.”

The trend crosses cultural boundaries researchers once thought mattered quite a lot. Individualistic Western nations like the US and UK were expected to value uniqueness. But collectivist East Asian cultures? Not so much. Yet China shows the same pattern: since 1970, Chinese parents have been choosing increasingly rare characters for their children’s names. After 1960, they also started bucking the traditional two-character name format, going for single characters or three-character names instead.

Indonesia, a Southeast Asian nation with different linguistic and cultural traditions than either East Asia or the West, follows suit. Between 1911 and 2010, unique names there dropped until about the 1970s, then reversed course and climbed steadily through 2010. The reasons for that mid-century dip remain unclear, but the recent rise fits the global pattern.

What’s driving this? Yuji Ogihara of Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, who reviewed these studies, points to a broader cultural shift towards individualism. Seeking uniqueness—standing out rather than fitting in—is one of individualism’s core components. And giving uncommon names is a validated measure of that individualistic impulse.

The evidence for rising individualism extends beyond baby names, though names might be one of the most visible markers. Parents worldwide seem increasingly determined to distinguish their children from the crowd, even when that crowd includes their own cultural traditions and family histories.

Some caveats apply. The oldest data, particularly from 19th-century Germany and the early American records, may not fully represent their populations. In the US, for instance, only 20 per cent of people had social security numbers in 1909, though that figure hit 80 per cent by 1919 and nearly 100 per cent after 1952. The more recent data is more reliable, but the long-term trends still hold.

And there are geographic gaps. Most research has focused on Europe, North America, and Asia. What about Africa, the Middle East, or Latin America? Nobody’s looked yet, or at least nobody’s published what they found. Given that names are cultural products shaped by language, history, and geography, different regions might show different patterns.

For now, though, the trend seems clear enough: seven nations, three continents, 220 years of records. Parents are increasingly choosing names that set their children apart. Whether that reflects deeper individualism or just changing tastes in what sounds appealing, the outcome is the same. The Marys and Johns, and their equivalents worldwide, are fading away, replaced by names that might be unique to just one child in an entire city.

The social implications remain murky. Do uncommon names help children develop stronger individual identities, or do they burden kids with names no one can spell? Does this trend towards uniqueness extend to other areas of parenting and education? And if individualism is rising globally, what does that mean for social cohesion and collective action?

Those questions will require more than baby name databases to answer. But the names themselves tell a story: across cultures, languages, and continents, we’re becoming a world of one-of-a-kinds.

Study link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-06156-1