The infant boy born unto Kim Kardashian and Kanye West has been named Saint West, the couple revealed on Monday.
Saint, not surprisingly, is a relatively rare name. Just 32 boys born in 2014 were registered with the first name Saint, according to records from the Social Security Administration (SSA).
Saints first appeared in the SSA records in 1891, when five baby girls were given the name. (The SSA database has recorded the birth, year and gender for each social security application since 1879.) Five years later, in 1896, there was a sudden spike in popularity when 10 baby boys were registered as Saints.
Since then, the name has bubbled up and down, but it seems to be experiencing a steady growth in popularity over the past decade. Since 2008, around a dozen Saints have been born each year – all boys. Looking at the data going back to 1940, more than 300 Saints have been born in America.
The image below comes from an interactive built by Randy Olson that uses SSA data to analyze US name trends.
Kim and Kanye’s first child, North West, was born in early 2013. North’s name is a bit rarer – especially for a girl.
The chart above, however, only includes data up to 2013. In 2014, there was a bump in the name North, but again, only for boys – 13 were recorded in that year alone. That suggests that celebrity culture might not be influencing our lives all that much. It remains to be seen whether the latest child born to the Kardashian-Wests will herald a new era of Saints for America.
