Annette

The name arose as a French diminutive of Anne, which derives from the Hebrew Channah, meaning favor. French speakers used it for generations before it crossed into English-speaking communities. In the United States, clerks documented only modest numbers of Annettes through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, until national broadcasts in the late 1950s carried it into the top one hundred.

An Annette tends to be pictured operating a laminator or coordinating carpools from the front seat of a station wagon. The name carries the buoyant rhythm of early space-age television, upbeat and entirely down-to-earth. With an estimated average age of sixty-one today, it reads as someone who keeps spare postage stamps in her wallet and writes in cursive as a matter of course. Fifty-one percent of living bearers belong to the baby boom generation. It is not currently competing for real estate on preschool cubbies.