Friends have directed me recently to a couple of online statistical "engines" devoted to given names, the first for the U.S. and the second for France: http://www.babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/ http://meilleursprenoms.com/ (NB: you need to have Java to use the US one. It's also there to sell a book.) In America, Whitney as a girl's name ranks #684, 459, 66, and 91, respectively, for the 1960s through 1990s, and places #448 for 2003. Female Whitneys peaked in the 1980s at over 1300 per million babies (not clear if that's all babies, or just girls), but have dropped to about 220/mil for 2003. (Fine with me; who wants all those unrelated people poaching our name?) Whitney as a boy's name cracks the top 1,000 in the 1910s, and again in the 1960s through 1980s. Male Whitneys peaked in the 1980s at 54 per million babies, then drop out of sight. Oddly, about 65 female Whitleys (per million babies) were born in the 1990s, the decade Whitney began to slide. I wonder if the parents were purposely avoiding the too-trendy Whitney-- as no doubt many parents of Whitneys were running from "Courtney" and "Brittany"! Whitney also made a mention in the author/sitemistress's blog for Thursday: "For boys, parents [ca. 1900] chose glittering dreams of aristocracy. Alongside John and George, we saw boys named with the surnames of the upper crust-- Milton, Sidney, Whitney." http://www.babynamewizard.com/blog/2005/03/days-when-myrtles-were- young.html Well, not quite... little Milton and Sidney were probably named for the poets, whom folks actually bothered to read back then, and any Whitney of the day almost certainly descended from John or Henry. Whitney is now showing up as a given name in France. 1993 was the peak year, with 53 christened. (Did Miss Houston have a major hit around that time?) Except for a lone(ly) birth in the 1940s (probably to some Anglo-Saxon couple, and likely male), there were none before the late 1980s. But, zut alors!, Whitney placed 1,770th for the 20th century, and was at 763rd for 2000: http://meilleursprenoms.com/stats/histogram.php3?recherche=whitney http://meilleursprenoms.com/Etymologie/Etymologie.php3?search=whitney Enter any traditional French name in the box, and you'll notice rather large troughs coinciding with the World Wars. The names weren't being given because the children weren't being born. Cheers, Ron Kyser