Six Dorothy LeMeure was the best friend of Blossom Russo in the hit ’90s TV show “Blossom.” It doesn’t matter if you don’t remember the show (in retrospect, it was terrible); what matters is that a name as cool as Six just doesn’t exist off-screen. A search in our names database reveals that there are virtually no living Americans, female or male, with the first name Six. (I say “virtually” because the Social Security Administration publishes data only for names that recur at least five times in a single year, so I guess it’s possible that there’s a Six out there somewhere — if you’re one, please get in touch).
This crushing disappointment (why does TV constantly lie to children?) led me to search for other numerical names. I looked up every number between one and twenty and found that none of them corresponded to American first names, with a sole exception: Seven. There are, based on our calculations, 1,100 men in the U.S. named Seven and 484 women with the same name.
George Costanza, for one, was into the name.
I wondered if maybe Seven has some meaning that I’m unaware of, some beautiful foreign etymology of which I have no knowledge. But BabyNamesPedia.com (along with many other sites) simply tells me:
The name’s meaning is number seven.
Perhaps it’s because people consider the number seven lucky or even magical. Or maybe it’s because it just sounds good — it’s the only single-digit number with two syllables (I spotted 1,353 American men called “Sixto” which apparently means “courteous one”). And while we’re on the topic of names that contain numbers, here’s every one I could find: