Alice

Meaning & origin

Alice may be the purest case of the hundred-year rule in American naming. Its recorded peak came in 1880, the very first year of Social Security data, when it ranked among the top girls' names in the country, followed by a decades-long slide into grandmother territory, and then a textbook revival that began in 1996 and has not paused since. By 2025 it stood 65th, with about 1 in every 453 newborn girls named Alice.

The name's cultural equipment barely needs listing: Carroll's Wonderland made Alice a synonym for curiosity itself, and bearers from suffragist Alice Paul to Nobel laureate Alice Munro give it real intellectual heft. Etymologically it is Adelaide's worn-smooth descendant, Germanic "nobility" filtered through Old French, a name that sounds simple and turns out to be layered.

Its American strongholds today are Vermont, the District of Columbia, and Maine, a northern New England lean shared with several other vintage revivals. Alice threads a needle few names manage: universally known, never misspelled, historically deep, yet still uncommon enough in most classrooms to feel like a discovery.

Alice reached English by erosion: the Germanic name Adalheidis (adal, "noble," plus heid, "kind, sort") was worn down in Old French to Adelais and then Aalis, which Norman settlers carried to England in the twelfth century as Alice. It was a staple of medieval England, common enough to be a stock peasant name in Chaucer's era, and never fully disappeared. Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), written for Alice Liddell, made it one of the most recognizable names in the language and helped drive its enormous Victorian popularity: when American record-keeping began in 1880 the name was already at its peak, sitting comfortably in the top 10. A long mid-century slide followed, bottoming out in the 1990s before the current revival took hold in 1996.

Read more: Alice on Wikipedia