Boy Names That Became Girl Names (and Vice Versa)
3rd November 2026
Picture a baby named Leslie, Kelly, or Ashley, and you’ll probably picture a girl. But all three names were once given mostly to boys. Looking at US baby names from 1936 to 2025, we found that 42 shifted from mostly boys to mostly girls, while just 12 went the other way. Explore the charts below to see how each name changed and what drove the shifts in each direction.
It has been my experience that a lot of upper-class (and wannabes) give both male and female offspring last names as first names—as in the above Leslie, Kelly, and Ashley. When I was at Yale, the President was Kingman Brewster, and his most famous recent predecessor was Whitney Griswold. We went to sweat at the Payne Whitney Gymnasium. Endicott Peabody was a famous headmaster at Groton. Think of Princeton alum Brooke Shields.