Isis falls from favor as baby name for Americans

Once popular choice for girls drops off 2015 list due to association with Islamic State, while Noah and Emma remain top picks

WASHINGTON (AP) — On baby names, at least, divided Americans can generally agree: Don’t call your child Isis.

The Social Security Administration released its annual list annual of top baby names Friday, and one major change was the girls’ name Isis (an Egyptian goddess) which had remained steadily in the middle of the pack of the country’s top 1,000 names for the last 15 years. In 2015, after the name had emerged as an acronym for the extremist group Islamic State, it dropped completely off the list.

That’s a dramatic shift, says Laura Wattenberg, baby name expert and founder of BabynameWizard.com.

“It’s actually quite rare for a name to be eliminated by issues in the news,” she says, noting that the name Adolph was still at No. 555 in the US at the end of World War II when the Nazis and Adolf Hitler fell.

There’s another recent example, though: the name Hillary dropped off the list in 2009, a year after Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic presidential primary to Barack Obama. The name was No. 721 in 2008. Hillary remained off the list this year, as did the name of her current Democratic primary opponent, Bernie, as in Sanders.

Barack has never appeared in the top 1,000 names, and the popularity of the name of Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush, dropped slightly during his eight-year presidency, from No. 130 to No. 163.

The first name of this year’s presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, also dropped in 2015, from No. 418 to No. 441.

Wattenberg said that unlike in the past, parents avoid politics in name choices today. But names of past presidents remain popular.

“We want our presidents out of office or preferably dead before we name our babies after them,” Wattenberg said.

The five most popular names for girls and boys remained unchanged, meanwhile, from the previous year. Noah was followed by Liam, Mason, Jacob and William for boys, while for girls Emma was followed by Olivia, Sophia, Ava and Isabella. Ava and Isabella switched spots from 2014, with Ava climbing to number 4.

The Social Security Administration’s website provides lists of the top 1,000 baby names for each year, dating to 1880. The top baby names that year were John and Mary. John is now No. 26 and Mary has fallen to No. 124.

This is not the first time that the name Isis has caused a stir. In 2014, the star of the hit show Downton Abbey was forced to deny widespread speculation that his character’s dog Isis had been killed off due to her name.

Anyone who thinks that this is the reason for the story line is a “complete berk,” said Hugh Bonneville, who played Lord Grantham, the Daily Mail reported.