It seems that the baby’s name, August, is gaining a star boost.
On Saturday, Princess Eugenie and her husband, Jack Brooksbank, announced that they had named their newborn son August Philip Hawke Brooksbank. On Tuesday, singer and actor Mandy Moore and her musician husband Taylor Goldsmith revealed that they chose the same name for their son, August Harrison Goldsmith.
His name choices reflect the rise in popularity that August saw during this century. The Social Security Administration’s list of baby names reveals that August jumped from 673 in 2004 to 167 in 2019 (the most recent year of available data).
“August is a name that combines a deep history – it’s a name from Ancient Rome – with a modern, non-traditional male image,” Pamela Redmond Satran, co-founder of the popular baby name website Nameberry, told HuffPost. “While it is not truly gender neutral, it is sometimes used for girls.”
In 2019, boys with the name of August totaled 2,366, compared to 2,283 in 2018 and 2,056 in 2017. The name even appeared on the list of the 1,000 main names for girls for the first time in 2018 at No. 898 (with 298 registered) and then at No. 844 in 2019 (with 317 in the books).
August is a vintage favorite. It peaked in popularity in 1901, at No. 141, and then gradually dropped on the list in subsequent decades, to its lowest point, at 930, in 1983. Satran noted that 1983 is the time when many of today’s parents were born .
“Usually, people don’t choose names from their own generation or certainly not from their parents’ generation, but they will look back four generations or 100 years ago,” she said. “In 1920, August was close to where it is now in popularity, at around 200.”
Famous past and present August include playwrights August Wilson and August Strindberg, musician August Alsina and academic August Coppola, brother of Francis Ford Coppola and father of Nicolas Cage.
The babies from Brooksbank and Goldsmith join a rather long list of famous children called August. Dave Matthews, Mariska Hargitay, June Diane Raphael, Lena Olin, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Ralphie May called their children August (or Auguste in Olin’s case). Garth Brooks has a daughter named August, as does actor Oscar Nunez from “Office”.
Other pop culture moments for the name include the 2007 film “August Rush” and Taylor Swift’s song “August” from her surprise 2020 album “Folklore”.
“So many celebrities, along with other parents, chose August because he can be young and old at the same time, break with conventional male names like William and James, but also because he is deeply rooted,” said Satran. “It’s kind of a name ‘Eat your cake and eat too’ … Plus, August means a lot – literally, ‘great!'”
Moore’s baby announcement indicated that she and Goldsmith are calling their son “Gus”. June Diane Raphael and Paul Scheer also call their son August “Gus”. Gus was quite popular as a full name for boys from the early 20th century to dropping off the top 1,000 list in the late 1970s. He reappeared in 2018 at No. 998, but not the following year. Only 195 boys were called Gus in 2019.
“Parents love Gus as a nickname that changes rhythm, but they suspect it is a full name,” Laura Wattenberg, founder of namerology.com and author of “The Baby Name Wizard, ” he told HuffPost. “This helped to boost the August high. August is also on the rise in England, but it is still much less common there than in the United States. An English Gus is more likely to come from the full name Angus. “
Another quite common nickname for August is “Auggie”, which is how the characters Cory and Topanga Matthews called their son, August, on the sitcom “Girl Meets World”. In addition, the main character in the popular novel “Maravilha” by RJ Palacio is August “Auggie” Pullman.
Similar names like Augusta, Augustus and Augustine have had varying trips in the United States. Augusto’s trajectory was similar to that of August – popularity in the early 20th century, followed by decline and revitalization in recent decades. The most recent SSA data put Augustus at 467 for boys.
After dropping off the top 1,000 list in the late 1980s, Augustine reappeared in 2013 and, more recently, reached number 731 for boys. The name Augusta dropped off the list of girls in 1945 and continues to decline, with only 49 girls receiving that name in 2019.
With these latest explosions in popularity, August appears to be the name of the most popular month in the US, ahead of June (No. 201 for girls, with 1,505 registered for newborns in 2019) and April (No. 493 for girls, with 633 registered in 2019). And, as the latest celebrities who chose the name have shown, you don’t have to be born in August to be called August.