Reader Question: Is the Popularity of "Saga" About to Skyrocket?
What to do when a beloved name's in the news--and how to tell if it might stick.
This week’s post comes out of a conversation I had with a friend a couple weeks ago, after the news broke that actress Megan Fox and singer Machine Gun Kelly had named their baby girl Saga. My friend is expecting, and she and her family love unique, meaningful word names. Because they have Scandinavian ancestry, they’ve also been focusing on names with connections to that culture. Saga checks all the boxes—they’ve even got storytellers in the family—so it’s been on their shortlist for a while now. But now that it’s a celebrity baby name, what happens next? Is it going to race to the top of the charts? Should my friend’s family rethink their plan?
The shortest of short answers I can offer is “you can never know for sure.” The slightly longer one is that yes, Saga may eventually become more popular—but not in a blinding rush to the top. And if it gains in popularity, it won’t be because of Megan Fox’s baby.
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In the baby name world, the classic go-to example of a “pop culture name” explosion is Madison. After Daryl Hannah’s mermaid character took her name from Madison Avenue in 1984’s Splash, Madison leapt onto the American top 1000 list at #625 in 1985 (going 41 female children getting the name in 1984 and fewer-than-51 in 1983) and then flew up the charts, reaching the top 100 by 1993 and sitting in the top 10 from 1997-2014.
Clearly, Madison became a wildly popular name in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and remains very well-used forty years later. And given the timing, there can be little argument that Splash is what thrust it into the public eye as a viable name for little girls—but Splash isn’t the reason it took off.
A few months ago, I talked about my fellow sociologist Stan Lieberson’s work on how the names most likely to jump into the spotlight are those that are different, but not too different. With that in mind, let’s look at other popular girls’ names from the late 1980s and early 1990s.
In 1989, these were some of the names in the top 100:
Lauren (#9), Megan (#11), Kristen (#36), Allison (#46) — consonant-heavy options that aren’t traditionally feminine and end in N.
Whitney (#57), Morgan (#69), Jordan (#72), Taylor (#75) — WASPy surnames being used as female first names.
12 of the top 100 female names that year started with M; 16 ended with N. Combine those elements with a light variation on the long-familiar name Madeline (ranked #623 in 1984 but had jumped to #289 by 1986 and hit the top 100 in 1994), and a glamorous movie character, and it’s no surprise the end result was a trendy new name with some staying power.
With that in mind, let’s look a little closer at Saga.
There are a few familiar names that could give it a boost. Maybe the obvious one is Sage; as I mentioned in a previous post, when Olivia started up the popularity charts, it pulled Oliver and even Olive along in its wake2.
Sage is definitely a rising name in the US; the number of female babies receiving the name nearly doubled between 2019 and 2024, and last year it ranked #145. But while Sage and Saga look very similar, they don’t actually sound much alike. To put on my linguistics hat for a moment, Sage’s central consonant is a voiced postalveolar affricate (“j” like “jump”); a fricative, like F, V, CH, S, Z, and TH. Meanwhile, Saga’s is a voiced velar plosive, a “stop” like B, P, T, D, K.
To put it plainly, that G stop isn’t a trendy sound right now. Only four of the 2024 top 100 girls’ names have a G in them; only two of those (Grace and Abigail) have the stop (versus the J-sound of Gianna and Genesis); and only one has it in the middle. In fact, right now, it’s not very common to find any sort of hard stop in the middle of a popular name. Especially a popular girls’ name. Look at 2024’s top 10 female names:
Olivia
Emma
Amelia
Charlotte
Mia
Sophia
Isabella
Evelyn
Ava
Sofia
Only two of these names have any hard stops at all, and only one, Isabella, has one in the middle. The fashion right now is for vowel-heavy names, often three or four syllables, most often with long vowel sounds, full of soft Ls and fricatives. So while the G stop isn’t a completely unfamiliar sound in girls’ names (it’s in Margaret, Margot, Magnolia, all top 150 names in 2024), it’s not an obvious place for a trend to catch on.
If I wanted to make a bet on a similar name that I thought might be likely to take off, I’d go with another girls’ word name with Scandinavian connections—Raven.
First things first: Raven is already more popular than Saga by a substantial margin. While Saga was given to 19 female babies in 2024, Raven was given to 813, ranked #386. And while it’s never been a chart-topper, it had a noticeable uptick in the 1990s with the rise of Raven-Symone, topping out at #139 in 1993. It’s started slowly climbing again over the last five years or so, and unlike Saga, it’s got a few elements that mean I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it continued to run up the charts.
Some of this is to do with its meaning: nature names are absolutely having a moment. The girls’ top 100 includes 8 of them, and while those are mostly plants, extending the list to the top 250 adds Summer and Ember, River and Wren. Parents are clearly looking for offbeat nature names for their daughters. Raven’s also phonetically on-trend; its long A matches many of the names from the top of the charts, and the popularity of the central V is evident from the fact that it features in 3 of the top 10 girls’ names from 2024.
Obviously, which names rise and fall in the charts each year is due to all kinds of factors, some of which even the biggest baby name sites can’t predict (witness the meteoric rise of Ailany in this year’s dataset, which seems to be pretty much entirely based on its phonetics). But at least for this year, I’d say that my friend is probably pretty safe using the name Saga. A celebrity naming on its own—just like a movie character or a hot new actor—isn’t going to be enough to pull a name out of obscurity.
If Megan Fox had used Raven, though, I might start looking for the hockey stick curve.
In addition to my writing here on Substack, I also work one-on-one with individuals and families looking to find names. I’ve been working as a name consultant for almost eight years and have dozens of satisfied clients. If you know someone who’s looking for the perfect name—for themself, their child, or someone or something else—please feel free to send them my way.
Quick reminder that the US Social Security Administration only releases data on names given to five or more babies of the same sex as a privacy measure, so any names given to fewer than five children have to fall into the same bucket category of “very, very unusual.”
In 2024, Olivia was #1, Oliver #3, and Olive #170, its second-highest rank in a hundred years.
I had never thought about it this way! I love how you isolate & explain the science alongside the social trends--mind blowing!