Scarlett

Meaning & origin

Few names owe as much to a single book. Scarlett enters the Social Security records in 1937, the year after Gone with the Wind was published, and for half a century it stayed a conversation piece rather than a contender. The climb that began in 1985 turned steep in the 2000s, helped along by Scarlett Johansson's fame, and the name crested in 2017. In 2025 it ranked 32nd nationally, going to about one in every 285 newborn girls.

Geographically, Scarlett runs strongest in Wyoming, Vermont, and Rhode Island, small states with little else in common, which suggests a name embraced broadly rather than by one regional style tribe. It sits comfortably in the vivid-vintage wave: parents who shortlist Scarlett tend to also consider Charlotte, Cora, and Quinn, names that pair antique polish with a definite personality.

Scarlett began as a medieval English surname for someone who dyed or sold scarlet, in the Middle Ages a costly cloth rather than simply a color, from Old French escarlate and Medieval Latin scarlata, a word whose deeper roots are debated (a Persian source, saqirlat, is often proposed but not certain). As a given name it is essentially a twentieth-century creation: Margaret Mitchell gave it to Katie Scarlett O'Hara, the heroine of Gone with the Wind (1936), presenting it in the novel as a family surname. American records first pick up the name in 1937, the year after the novel appeared, and it stayed a curiosity for decades before Scarlett Johansson's rise to fame helped carry it into the mainstream in the 2000s.

Read more: Scarlett on Wikipedia