1920s Name Generator

How the 1920s Name Generator works

1920s name generator: the patterns behind each name

The 1920s was the first decade with reliable name statistics on both sides of the Atlantic, and the generator uses them. In the United States the top boys' names were Robert, John, James and William as they had been for a century, but the names that mark a man as born around 1900 and grown up in the twenties are the ones just below them: Harold, Walter, Raymond, Clarence, Chester, Howard, Earl, Floyd, Ralph, Roy, Carl, Eugene, Lloyd, Milton, Vernon, Elmer, Leroy, Wilbur, Homer, Clyde. For women the decade belonged to Dorothy, Mildred, Helen, Margaret, Ruth, Virginia, Betty, Doris, Evelyn, Frances, Marjorie, Lois, Gladys, Thelma, Bernice, Lorraine, and the two-syllable surge of Betty, Shirley and Jean that would dominate the thirties was beginning. Americans used nicknames as names, Chuck, Buddy, Red, Slim, Sonny, Mac, Doc, Duke, Hank, and Dot, Millie, Babe, Bunny, Peggy, Kitty, Trixie, Toots, Billie, and a woman who called herself Babe or Bobbie or Tommie was announcing that she was a flapper. The immigrant surnames were now everywhere in the cities, Kowalski, Rossi, Goldberg, Russo, Nowak, Schwartz, and the generator's American option gives them their share.

American society was something else, and its names are the reason Fitzgerald could tell a whole story with one. The old Dutch and Yankee families of New York and Boston, Van Rensselaer, Beekman, Schermerhorn, Stuyvesant, Livingston, Cabot, Lowell, Winthrop, Peabody, Saltonstall, gave their sons Chester, Prescott, Sterling, Winthrop, Cornelius, Bradford, with a mother's maiden name in the middle and Jr., II or III at the end, and their daughters Daisy, Rosalind, Marguerite, Cornelia, Consuelo, Muriel, Gwendolyn. In Britain the same years produced a different sound. The ordinary British names were Alfred, Arthur, Cyril, Reginald, Leslie, Stanley, Sidney, Wilfred, Percy and Doris, Joan, Peggy, Vera, Irene, Kathleen, Joyce, Eileen, Marjorie, Winifred, Hilda, shortened to Alf, Bert, Reg, Sid and Peg, Vi, Dot, Winnie, Flo, Queenie. British society, the Bright Young Things and the Wodehouse set, used the nursery names of the upper class that were never outgrown, Bunny, Tuppy, Gussie, Bingo, Boy, Bobo, Baba, Debo, Kick, with surnames from Debrett's, Mitford, Ponsonby, Curzon, Tennant, Guinness, Lygon, Cunard, Sitwell, and double-barrelled ones, Sackville-West, Fotheringay-Howard, prefixed with Lady, the Hon., Sir and Captain.

For the decade before, the Victorian page covers the parents of these people; for the decade after the war, the 1950s page; and for present-day names, the American and British pages. The Random name page draws from the whole modern stock.

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