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Lottie: The Baby Name That Fell to 13 Babies a Year

Lottie fell to just 13 babies in 2000 after a top-100 run in the 1880s. Now it's risen every year since 2017 — the real data behind a quiet comeback.

If you meet a baby Lottie today, she reads like part of the same wave as Charlotte and Eleanor — short, warm, a little old-fashioned. That’s fair. What’s easy to miss is that Lottie didn’t just fade for a while between eras. It came closer to disappearing entirely than almost any name still in active use.

A quietly strong start

Lottie enters the record in 1880 with 245 babies and a rank of #88 — already comfortably inside the top 100. It stays there through the whole decade, never dropping below #88 and reaching its best rank ever, #75, in 1886 with 450 babies.

The name’s biggest year in raw numbers comes later: 1,389 babies in 1916, its all-time high count. By then the rank had actually slipped to #143 — more babies were being named overall, and more names were competing for them, so a bigger number bought a lower spot. Lottie held on inside the top 200 through the early 1920s, finally dropping below that line in 1924 (rank #203).

The long fall

From there the decline runs for most of the 20th century, slow at first and then unmistakable:

By the year 2000, Lottie had gone from a top-100 mainstay to thirteen babies in the entire country — a name so rare it barely registered in the data at all.

The turn, and a real dip inside it

The recovery is not a clean straight line, which is part of what makes it interesting. Lottie ticks up through the 2000s and 2010s, reaches 101 babies in 2016 — and then dips back to 84 in 2017, its most recent step backward. Every year since has been a rise:

• 2017 — 84 babies, #2,236
• 2019 — 130 babies, #1,629
• 2021 — 227 babies, #1,091
• 2023 — 363 babies, #776
• 2025 — 570 babies, #527

That’s eight consecutive years of growth off the 2017 low, and the name has more than doubled in the last four years alone. Lottie is still rare enough that a child with the name is likely to be the only one in her class — usually the sweet spot for a name that’s climbing rather than cresting.

Where it goes next

Our forecast model projects Lottie continuing to rise: about 577 babies in 2026, climbing to roughly 907 by 2030.

If that holds, Lottie would still be a long way from its 1916 peak of 1,389 — but it would have more than sextupled from its 2015 count of 79 in the space of fifteen years. For a name that spent the entire back half of the 20th century nearly extinct, that’s a real second act, not just a blip.

25 names riding the same wave

Lottie isn’t doing this alone. These are 25 vintage girl names — Lottie included — currently climbing back from their own near-disappearance, ranked by where they stand in 2025:

Lottie sits almost exactly in the middle of this pack — well past the still-rare end (Effie, Tillie, Fern) but nowhere near the names that have already finished the climb, like Iris at #61 and Millie at #73. If Lottie’s forecast holds and it keeps closing the gap the way Millie and Iris already have, this is roughly what the next stretch of the story looks like.

Every count on this page is a number of real American babies, taken from the official national birth record that runs back to 1880.

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration data, 1880–2025.