Edith
The story
Edith is pure Old English, Eadgyth, built from roots meaning riches and war, usually rendered as prosperous in war, and it survived the Norman Conquest when most Anglo-Saxon names did not, kept alive partly by the memory of Saint Edith of Wilton, a tenth-century royal abbess. That deep history made it a Victorian favorite, and American parents agreed: the name stood at its height in the decades around 1900 and stayed strong through the 1920s, the era of the novelist Edith Wharton. Then came the long fade, until Edith had all but vanished from the mainstream by the 1970s, though it never quite left the records. The climb back in recent decades has been steady and real, and the timing of Downton Abbey's Lady Edith is hard to ignore, though vintage revivals rarely have a single cause. Edith today reads the way it always deserved to: sturdy, literary, and quietly back.
Popularity, 1890–2024
Shape drawn from US Social Security baby-name records. Edith peaked in the 1900s and the 1910s in nearly equal measure.
See popularity in Brazil
Popularity in Brazil
7,394 people · the #2,096 first name in Brazil · about 1 in 27,778 · median age 72
Among people named Edith living in Brazil at the 2022 census, more were born in the 1930s than in any other decade.
The census also counted 31 born between 2020 and August 2022, too recent a span to chart.
Source: IBGE, Censo Demográfico 2022
The Edith deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Edith truly comes from, how it traveled, and what a century of records reveals. If you have grown a tree on nametree, it also considers how Edith fits with your family’s names and surname.
Keep exploring
Names like Edith · Nicknames for Edith · Saint names for babies and confirmation
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