Ashanti

Where Ashanti comes from

Ashanti hasn't made it into the dictionaries we draw on, and nobody well known enough for an encyclopedia has carried it yet — so for now its story is the one the SSA record tells. Names that spell a familiar sound a new way often live here for a while before anyone writes them down.

  • Vowel-ended
Along the way
  1. 1952
    Ashanti Obi born
    Nigerian sprinter
  2. 1954
    Ashanti Omowali Alston born
    American anarchist activist
  3. 1970
    First appearance
    #4,038 among girls, 14 babies — the first year at least five got the name.
  4. 1975
    Mostly girls from here
    Until now more boys than girls got the name; from this year it's the other way round, and has stayed that way.
  5. 2002
    Peak, #115
    2,946 babies named Ashanti — more than any year before or since.
  6. 2003
    The fade
    The first year with half the peak's births — down to #325.
In the dictionary

No dictionary entry for this spelling — which is its own kind of rare.

Namesakes
  • Ashanti Omowali Alston · American anarchist activist, born 1954
  • Ashanti Obi · Nigerian sprinter, born 1952
  • Ashanti Johnson · American geochemist and chemical oceanographer
  • Ashanti Akpan · English footballer, born 2004

Sources: the origin note and dictionary entry are quoted from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0); the namesakes come from Wikidata (CC0); the milestones are worked out from the SSA record.