B. writes:

I recently met a baby boy named Teagan (which I had always put firmly in the “girl name” column in my head), and a twentysomething woman named Keegan (which I had always put firmly in the “boy name” column).

There are, of course, names like Ashley, Quinn, Skylar, Jordan that start as “boy names” and then become unisex, and some even become more common as girl names.

Do you think Teagan is that rare name that starts girl and goes boy?

What are your thoughts on Keegan as a girl name (just generically, not in the “it’s an honor name because it’s my grandmother’s maiden name” or whatever scenario?)

I’m the same as you: Teagan is familiar to me as a name used for girls, and Keegan is familiar to me as a name used for boys. But my sample size is very small: I only know one Keegan (male) and two Teagans (both female). (Plus a male cat named Keegan, but I’m including only humans in this sample.) And until I met the two female Teagans, I wouldn’t have known how to take that name: I specifically remember hearing it for the first time and not knowing whether the child would be a girl or a boy.

Isn’t it interesting how similar the two names are? And if I were hearing them for the first time and knew one was used more often for girls and the other used more often for boys, I’d probably guess them wrong: I’d guess the K was more likely to indicate the name used for girls. So in short, this is an excellent illustration about how it’s CURRENT USAGE that dictates whether a name feels like “a boy name” or “a girl name” to us. And in the United States, the -gan ending is not gender specific: Megan, Reagan, Finnegan, Logan, Morgan, Brogan, etc.

As you mentioned, most names switching from one usage to the other are headed in the boy-to-girl direction and not the other way around. Let’s see what Teagan and Keegan have been doing, checking in with them every five years. Because this is going to involve a lot of number-hunting through a lot of years, I’m not going to try to incorporate every spelling, but these seem to be the main three for each (I’m showing my work, to make it easier for anyone to check if something seems off):

(left to right for each sex: Kegan, Keegan, Keagan, Tegan, Teegan, Teagan)

This shows us an interesting picture of how we as a society incorporate a name or name-sound that’s new to us. I mentioned this briefly the other day when we were talking about Milborough: that when a name is unused, we can do what we want with it—but it’s hard to know what it’ll do if it comes into use later on. An individual person can say that a name is “definitely girl, to me” or “definitely boy, to me”—but what ends up mattering is what the culture as a whole thinks of it over time.

And that’s what we’re seeing on this chart: two new names came onto the scene, and this is the story of how the United States incorporated them. Teagan and Keagan were all but unused in the United States before the 1970s. Morgan and Logan had been names used almost exclusively for boys—but the name Megan had just appeared on the scene for girls a decade or so earlier and was getting very popular. With Megan’s increasing popularity came a rise in the name Morgan being used for girls as well as for boys. Meanwhile, Irish and Irish-like names were hot stuff, so people were looking for new good ones.

That’s when Keegan showed up. Maybe the first parents who used it had a male ancestor named Keegan, or knew it was a name used for boys in Ireland, and that’s why they used it for boys. Maybe it sounded boyish to them because of other names of the time. Whatever the reasons, Keegan showed up for boys in the 1960s, but not for girls until the 1980s. Meanwhile, Teagan appears in the 1970s, but only for girls. It doesn’t show up for boys until the 1980s. (Keeping in mind that my dates are rough/approximate here because of only checking in every 5 years.)

You can see people trying to figure out how we’re going to spell these names. There’s some dabbling with the spelling Tegan at first, maybe because it looks like Megan. By 2012, though, Teagan is by far the most common spelling for both girls and boys. Keegan comes on the scene as the first spelling of that name, and persists as the most common spelling even after being joined by Kegan and Keagan.

Looking just at Tegan/Teegan/Teagan now, I don’t see a name that started as a name for girls and is heading toward being a name for boys. I see something that looks more like a name that started with girls, then veered toward unisex as the similar name Keegan became popular for boys—but now the boys might be backing away from Teagan as it gets more widely used overall and as parents encounter more female Teagans out and about. Or maybe everyone is backing away from both names as they finish their run of being in style: of the twelve categories of spelling/sex, all of them went down between 2010 and 2012 except a slight increase of Teegan (95 to 99) and Keegan (1424 to 1462) used for boys.

But 11 of the 12 categories went UP (in some cases by quite a bit) between the 2005 numbers and the 2010 numbers: Teagan/Tegan/Teegan more than DOUBLED for girls during that time. Meanwhile, the name Teague is still going up for boys. I feel like we need another five years or so before we’ll be able to see what’s going on. What does everyone else see happening, when you look at the chart?

We can also try looking at the rankings, instead of at the plain numbers. Picking the most common spellings of each name, we see that Keegan is the 244th most popular name for boys in 2012, but not even in the Top 1000 for girls; meanwhile, Teagan is the 258th most popular name for girls in 2012, and the 755th most popular name for boys. It’s interesting to me how close the ranking of Keegan for boys is to the ranking of Teagan for girls. The rankings of Keegan for girls and Teagan for boys show us that Teagan is somewhat more familiar/used as a boy name than Keegan is as a girl name—which we could also see from the plain numbers.

You also asked what I thought of Keegan for a girl, as a name chosen for itself and not as a namesake. I don’t see any reason it couldn’t work, especially after spending so much time looking at Teagan and Keegan together. It seems like a cute, high-energy name in the tradition of Megan and Keely and Reagan and Breeanna—but with the additional factor of being a name currently used more often for boys, which would be either a plus or a minus depending on the particular family. The package deal would include the same elements as choosing any name more often used for the other sex: the periodic explaining/clarifying/correcting, the additional considerations when choosing sibling names.