There was a time in living memory when one in every 11 boys born in Victoria was called John.

Compare that with today, when Oliver has been the most popular boys’ name since 2014, but only one in every 67 young boys answers to it.

Names have always come and gone out of fashion but nowadays our most common names are far less common than they used to be.

The reason is an explosion in variety, with multiculturalism and parents’ desire for individuality causing the pool of baby names to widen dramatically.

The trend is one of many things uncovered by The Age while putting together an interactive database of the state’s top 100 names since 1929.

Professor Jo Lindsay from Monash University has researched naming practices in Australia and said parents today had more freedom and fewer family expectations than previous generations.

But the flipside to that was more pressure to choose the "right" kind of name.

“Parents want their kids to stand out – your name is the ultimate personal brand really and is perceived to locate kids in the social hierarchy,” Professor Lindsay said.

“But it’s not totally individualised. [Parents] want them to stand out but not too much.”

That was because her research found Australians tended to be quite judgemental about names, with certain names being described as “professional” or “bogan”.

Some parents were thinking about what their child’s name would look like on a business card or as a High Court judge, she said, while others wanted their children to pursue creative endeavours and so shied away from common names.

“Parents perceived that a good name can smooth a path to future success while a poor choice of name can create an obstacle to be ‘overcome’ or managed throughout the child’s life,” Professor Lindsay wrote, with colleague Deborah Dempsey in their paper Middle-Class Naming Practices in Australia.

"Names to be avoided were labelled by some parents as 'checkout operator' names or 'childcare worker' names, or 'DHS (Department of Human Services) client' names indicating family dysfunction, and 'made-up' names with 'creative spelling'," the report says.

The rise of Harriet

For parents Alexander and Emily, it seemed fate that their second daughter should be named Harriet, which over the past five years has become increasingly popular in Victoria, coming in 42nd in 2017.

“We had a few different options, as we got closer to the due date we had a couple of
signs,” Alexander (35th when he was born in 1986) explains.

“The media manager at Epworth Maternity – where Harriet was born on Wednesday – had a daughter called Harriet and a friend of ours called Harriet was born on the same day as the due date of our Harriet.”

Alexander said the couple didn’t consider how popular their name options were but based their decision purely on how much they liked the name.

“The main factor was, our first daughter was called Madeleine, so we wanted a longer
and structured name to go with that. We like traditional names,” he said.

Certainly the couple are not alone, with names such as Eleanor, Audrey, Grace, Harry and Jack returning to the top of the list of baby names in recent times after absences of many decades.

By contrast some names seemingly never go out of fashion.

Names with longevity tend to be those “from the Bible or the royal family”, Professor Lindsay said.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the only girl’s name to appear in every top 100 list since 1929 is Elizabeth.

Seven boys’ names have achieved the same feat: Michael, William, James, George, Joseph, Patrick and Thomas.

Girls names to have broken into the top 100 this century include Aaliyah, Addison, Eden, Emilia, Frankie and Jorja.

New arrivals for boys include Flynn, Logan, Kai, Archie, Jett, Levi and Ryder.