My Best Nickname

Let’s take a look at names that end in -ette over the last 100 years. Below we have a table of names given to American girls in 2012, 1962 and 1902  that began with the letters A through L. (M through Y are covered in this post). That’s 50 years apart for each row. Many folks believe that today’s names are far more creative than in decades gone by. That doesn’t seem to be the case with names ending in -ette, at least going back to 1962.

You will see that names ending the -ette suffix were far more trendy in 1962. 50 years earlier, in 1902, there were very few. The -ette suffix was mainly used to make a pet name or diminutive in French-speaking countries. In Italian, it’s -etta and in Spanish, it’s -ita.

The table is in alphabetical order to facilitate comparison. Here are the top 5 names in each year:

2012: Juliette, Colette, Scarlette, Annette, Bridgette
1962: Annette, Jeanette, Yvette, Lynette, Bernadette
1902: Jeanette, Jeannette, Antoinette, Annette, Bernadette

These statistics were compiled from U.S. Social Security (SSA) name data for 2012, 1962 and 1902. The figures to the right of each name shows the number of births the name was attributed to. The SSA does not publish statistics for names given to less than 5 children in any year. In the early 1900s, there were undoubtedly a lot more children born at home as well and some of them probably had an -ette name. One syllable names, like Bette, Brette and Jette, don’t really qualify as names with an -ette suffix, so they were not included.