New Post
Search
Help[Facts] Paige
This name is featured now and then on the BabyCenter.com naming polls, and people regularly find it "classic". I'm not at all sure what they mean by that, but I've never seen or heard of a Paige in South Africa, and we're usually up with the trends (Megans, Taylors, Kims and Savannahs abound).
My guess would be that it started as a surname used as a given name, and therefore probably migrated from boys to girls, changing its spelling on the way. Is that right? And is there any documentation about when this happened - popularity charts don't help much until a name becomes popular enough to show up.
My guess would be that it started as a surname used as a given name, and therefore probably migrated from boys to girls, changing its spelling on the way. Is that right? And is there any documentation about when this happened - popularity charts don't help much until a name becomes popular enough to show up.
1
Replies
I'm not sure there's been any spelling change, as "Paige" is as or more common as a spelling for the surname as "Page" is.
The regular use of Paige as a girls' name in the USA is one of the remaining mysteries to me. Paige first entered the SSA top 1000 list in 1952. There were two popular young women entertainers in the USA at that time with the surname (actress Janis Paige and singer Patti Page), but that may be a coincidence as this seems way before the era when a celebrity's surname would immediately become a given name for girls. So far I haven't been able to find an instance of a fictional character or well-known real life woman with the first name of Paige back in the 1940s or very early 1950s. I really think there must have been one. I suspect that rather than an entertainer this was a woman otherwise "in the news", as it's harder to find references to people who were briefly famous 60 years ago if they weren't entertainers.
It is rather amazing that some people think this is a "classic" name, as Paige basically became a female given name during the lifetime of persons still living today. To call Paige a "classic" name is to stretch the meaning of that term beyond reason, IMHO. :)
The regular use of Paige as a girls' name in the USA is one of the remaining mysteries to me. Paige first entered the SSA top 1000 list in 1952. There were two popular young women entertainers in the USA at that time with the surname (actress Janis Paige and singer Patti Page), but that may be a coincidence as this seems way before the era when a celebrity's surname would immediately become a given name for girls. So far I haven't been able to find an instance of a fictional character or well-known real life woman with the first name of Paige back in the 1940s or very early 1950s. I really think there must have been one. I suspect that rather than an entertainer this was a woman otherwise "in the news", as it's harder to find references to people who were briefly famous 60 years ago if they weren't entertainers.
It is rather amazing that some people think this is a "classic" name, as Paige basically became a female given name during the lifetime of persons still living today. To call Paige a "classic" name is to stretch the meaning of that term beyond reason, IMHO. :)
1
Yeah, I do agree that "classic" and "in my lifetime" are mutually exclusive . That's my story, and I'm sticking to it! But your answer has got me even more puzzled: the Patti Page and Janis Paige connection could have sparked off a trend - didn't that happen with Grace Kelly's surname, at much the same time? - but at the same time there was the pageboy haircut for women that was seen on every street, and therefore much more widely known than these entertainers, and I'd have thought that it would have neutralised the celeb effect (having one's hair cut in a a bob didn't give rise to an epidemic of Roberts and Robertas, and Robyn came too late).
Oh, and in South Africa the Page people outnumber the Paiges quite massively according to the telephone directory! I've never met a ln Paige, and so I assumed that Page had been prettified. Thanks!
Oh, and in South Africa the Page people outnumber the Paiges quite massively according to the telephone directory! I've never met a ln Paige, and so I assumed that Page had been prettified. Thanks!
1
Actually you can't attribute Kelly as a female given name to Grace Kelly. The name first enters the SSA top 1000 list in 1948, two years before Grace Kelly's first appearance on television and four years before the film High Noon which made her a movie star.
I'm not sure what caused Kelly's initial regular use as a female name, but its real sudden boom which made it decidedly more female than male in the USA definitely comes from the character Kelly Gregg, a teenage girl on the television situation comedy Bachelor Father, which started in 1957.
I'm not sure what caused Kelly's initial regular use as a female name, but its real sudden boom which made it decidedly more female than male in the USA definitely comes from the character Kelly Gregg, a teenage girl on the television situation comedy Bachelor Father, which started in 1957.
This message was edited 2/28/2007, 7:55 AM
1