Melville

Where Melville comes from

Melville 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. 1833
    Melville Fuller born
    chief justice of the United States from 1888 to 1910
  2. 1880
    First SSA year, and the peak
    #425 among boys with 17 babies — the first year on record, and still its best.
  3. 1881
    The fade
    The first year with half the peak's births — down to #781.
  4. 1917
    Melville Shavelson born
    American film director, producer, screenwriter, and author
In the dictionary

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

Namesakes
  • Melville Fuller · chief justice of the United States from 1888 to 1910, 1833–1910
  • Melville Shavelson · American film director, producer, screenwriter, and author, 1917–2007
  • Melville J. Herskovits · American anthropologist, 1895–1963
  • Melville Cooper · British actor, 1896–1973
  • Melville Rogers · figure skater, 1899–1973

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.