Wicked: For Good opened on November 21st to a $540 million global gross on a $150 million budget, and by the time I write this, the holiday-weekend domestic numbers are still climbing. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande are still the dominant pop-culture conversation, the Erivo-Grande friendship continues to be the cleanest celebrity-friendship narrative of the year, and the music is back on the Billboard charts. The naming question that I keep coming back to, watching the box office, is what the second installment does to Edwardian girls' naming that the first installment, in 2024, only partially started.
What the first Wicked actually moved
The naming consensus during and immediately after Wicked Part One was that Elphaba would move. Elphaba did not move. The name is too distinctive, too tied to a single fictional character, and too phonetically unusual to make the transition from screen to birth certificate at any meaningful scale. SSA's 2024 data showed a few — perhaps a dozen Elphabas nationally — but the name remained outside the top 1000 and probably will not enter it. Elphaba is the kind of name that produces affection without producing adoption, which is a category I find genuinely useful in distinguishing pop-cultural names that work from pop-cultural names that don't.
What the first Wicked did move, more interestingly and less obviously, was a register of girls' names that I'd describe as soft-Edwardian. The names that climbed in 2024 SSA data after the November 2024 release include Madeline (up about thirty places, into the upper 100s), Marigold (up about sixty places from a lower starting position), Margery (still rare but visible), Margaret (small but real climb after a long flat period), Eloise (already climbing, accelerated meaningfully), and Lila and Linda, both of which I'd argue are tied to the Glinda/Galinda phonetic family even though parents won't articulate the connection.
The Glinda effect on Lila and Linda is the most interesting one to me, because it operates indirectly. Parents are not naming their daughters Glinda — that name is locked to the character. They are naming their daughters Lila and Linda, both of which have similar mouth-feel and end-syllable structure, and both of which climbed visibly after Wicked Part One. Linda specifically is the surprise in 2024 SSA data — the name had been declining for sixty years, and the decline genuinely flattened in 2024 for the first time since the late 1960s. The flattening corresponds with no other identifiable cultural event. I'd argue, with reasonable confidence, that Wicked is the cause.
Why second installments matter more for naming
The Game of Thrones data taught us something specific about how naming responds to multi-installment cultural products: first installments establish the register, second installments deepen the consequences. Game of Thrones Season 1 in 2011 produced almost no Daenerys movement; Season 2 in 2012 produced the first measurable bump; the cumulative effect peaked in 2014. The same pattern is visible across multi-installment film franchises. Lord of the Rings: Fellowship in 2001 did almost no naming work; Two Towers and Return of the King produced the bulk of the Aragorn, Eowyn, and Faramir bumps in 2002 and 2003 SSA data.
The mechanism is straightforward. First installments introduce the names; parents need time to absorb the names, decide how they feel about the names, and consider whether the names work for their own families. The second installment serves as confirmation — it says, this is not a one-film fluke, this is a cultural product worth investing in. Parents who were on the fence after the first installment commit during or after the second. The second installment also typically introduces new names that benefit from the established cultural infrastructure of the first.
What I'd predict from Wicked: For Good
Three predictions, in declining confidence. First, the soft-Edwardian register that the first installment activated should accelerate. Madeline, Eloise, Marigold, and Margery should each gain another twenty to forty SSA places in 2026 data. The whole register should show movement — not just the names tied directly to Wicked but the broader category of three-syllable, vintage-feeling, Edwardian-resonant girls' names. Second, Linda and Lila should continue their stabilization or modest climb. Linda specifically is interesting because it's been declining since 1969 — any sustained reversal of a sixty-year decline is a remarkable cultural event. Third, names that appear specifically in Wicked: For Good but not in the first installment will get small bumps, and the cleanest candidate is probably Nessa or some derivation thereof, depending on the screen time the character receives.
What I'd not predict is meaningful Elphaba movement. The name remains structurally non-adoptive, regardless of the second installment's success. I also wouldn't predict major movement on Glinda — the name has historical baggage from the original 1939 Wizard of Oz and is too specific to a single fictional character to absorb new use.
The Bridgerton parallel and what it teaches
The cleanest recent comparison for Wicked's effect on Edwardian girls' naming is Bridgerton, which I've been tracking since its 2020 launch. Bridgerton produced an unusually long and durable naming bump — Daphne went from outside the top 200 in 2019 to top 110 in 2024 (a 83 percent rise from baseline); Eloise went from outside the top 350 to top 154 in the same window (127 percent from baseline). The Bridgerton effect was sustained partly because the show kept producing new seasons that reinforced the original register, and partly because the broader cultural attention to Edwardian and Regency aesthetics — fashion, interior design, weddings, food — gave the naming bump a much wider cultural infrastructure to operate within.
Wicked is benefiting from the same broader infrastructure. The Edwardian-Regency aesthetic that Bridgerton has been ratifying since 2020 is now the dominant girls' naming aesthetic for the upper-bracket parents I described in the Karlie Kloss piece, and Wicked is one of several cultural products contributing to that aesthetic's continued dominance. The naming effect of Wicked: For Good will be, in part, additive to the naming effect of Bridgerton's most recent seasons. They are doing the same cultural work, in slightly different visual registers, and the cumulative naming consequence is larger than any single product.
What this is not
It is not the case that every Edwardian girls' name will rise. The register is selective. Names that read as too archaic — Mehitabel, Hephzibah, Honoria, Cordelia in some forms — have ceiling effects that the broader register does not. Names that read as too British — Henrietta, Beatrice in some pronunciations, Wilhelmina — have a more limited adoption pattern in American naming, though these can move modestly. The names that perform best in this register are the ones that are old without being museum pieces: Eloise, Madeline, Margery, Marigold, Cordelia in its more accessible spelling, and Beatrice (which has been climbing for several years independently of Wicked).
The boring qualifier is that I'd be cautious about predicting magnitudes. Forty-place SSA moves on names in the upper 100s are within the noise band of year-over-year variation, which means any specific name I named could fail to deliver the bump I'm predicting. The directional argument — Wicked's second installment will accelerate the soft-Edwardian register, the register will continue to be reinforced by Bridgerton and adjacent products, and the cumulative effect will be visible in 2026 SSA data — is the more durable claim. The specific names will be whatever they end up being, and reading the 2026 data carefully will tell us which of my candidates landed.
Why this register is winning
The reason the soft-Edwardian register is, I think, the dominant girls' naming aesthetic of the mid-2020s is that it solves a specific cultural problem. American parents in the upper-middle-class demographic want names that feel literary, vintage, and tasteful without feeling dated or preachy. The Edwardian register fits — the names are old enough to read as substantial without being old enough to read as period-piece costume. The register has been climbing for a decade. Wicked: For Good is going to give it another sustained year of acceleration, and by the time the second installment's naming consequences show up in 2026 SSA data, we should see the register dominate the upper-bracket girls' chart in a way that it hasn't, structurally, since the original Edwardian period itself.
Data source: U.S. Social Security Administration. Analysis by NamesPop.
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