Alexa, Siri, Tesla: what happens to a baby name when it becomes something else

Alexa was the 32nd most common name for American baby girls in 2015. In 2024 it was given to 348 girls, 94% fewer than in 2015. Amazon's Echo speaker, which answers to "Alexa", went on sale in late 2014. After adjusting for the general fall in US births, Alexa's share of girls' names is down 91% since 2014.

It is not the only one. Siri went from 120 girls a year to 7. Tesla, which rose with the car company to 167 girls in 2015, fell below five in 2024, the point at which the Social Security Administration stops listing a name. Isis lost 87% of its babies in two years after 2014 and has only partly recovered. In the other direction, Game of Thrones, Star Wars and Disney films turned Khaleesi, Arya, Kylo and Mirabel from almost unused names into names given to hundreds or thousands of babies a year.

The figures come from the SSA's national baby name files for 2000–2024, the same records behind our age from name API. They were computed on 13 October 2026.

How we measured

For each name we took the number of US babies of the relevant sex given it each year, and the year of the outside event: a product launch, a news event or a film or series. The percentage in the chart is the change in the name's share of births of that sex between the event year and 2024. US births fell by about 10% over the period, so a raw count would overstate every fall and understate every rise.

The data shows when a name changed, not why. The events are the obvious candidates, and for most of these names the timing is close, but other things changed too.

Names that became products

Alexa's curve has a detail worth noticing. The name rose in 2015, to 6,052 girls, before it fell. The Echo was sold by invitation at first and became common in American homes in 2016 and 2017, and that is when the name dropped: 4,771 in 2016, 3,064 in 2018, 708 in 2021. Parents seem to have dropped the name once the device was in other people's kitchens, not when it was announced.

Tesla is the only one of the three that rose with the brand. It went from 59 girls in 2010 to 167 in 2015, then fell every year to under five in 2024.

Names that became news

Katrina fell by more than two-thirds in the three years after the hurricane, from 1,328 girls in 2005 to 419 in 2008, and never came back. Isis fell further and faster, from 401 girls in 2014 to 53 in 2016, but it is the one name here that is recovering: 228 girls in 2024, more than in any year since 2014.

Karen needs a caveat. It was already in steep decline before the meme: from 2,331 girls in 2003 to 631 in 2014, a fall of 73% with no meme involved. The share fell another 59% after 2018. The meme may have sped up a decline that was happening anyway, but most of the decline came first.

Names that came from the screen

Khaleesi is not a name in the books or the series but a title, and it did not appear in the US records at all before 2011, the year the series started. Arya and Khaleesi both peaked in 2018 and 2019, around the final season, and have fallen since. Kylo, named after a villain, is still rising nine years after the film.

Elsa and Mirabel show the Disney pattern: a sharp jump in the year after the film, then a fall. Elsa more than doubled in 2014 and was back below its pre-film level by 2018.

What this means for a name's age

A name that rises and falls quickly pins down an age. Most American Khaleesis were born between 2012 and 2024; nobody named Khaleesi is over 15. Most Alexas were born between 1995 and 2018, and a baby Alexa is now rare. Our age estimates use exactly this: a name's births by year, weighted by survival, give the likely age of the people who carry it.

For gender, none of these names changed sides: they are all as female or as male now as they were before. Names that did change sex are a different list: boys' names that became girls' names.

Reproducing it

The script is scripts/names-and-brands.py. It reads the SSA yearly files for 2000–2024 and writes one JSON file with each name's births per year, its peak, and its change in share since the event year and since its peak. scripts/names-and-brands-chart.mjs draws the chart from that file. The SSA lists a name in a year only if at least five babies of one sex received it, so a count of zero means fewer than five.

Related: do names come back after 100 years? and unisex names by country.