Arthur peaked in 1921 at rank 14 and held inside the top 100 through 1968. Then the name disappeared from the upper register for forty years, sitting in the 200s through most of the late 20th century. Today at rank 105, Arthur has nearly returned to its 1968 position — a comeback that took five decades and is still in progress. Few names demonstrate the long arc of revival cycles this clearly.
The Celtic root and the legendary king
Arthur derives from Celtic roots, generally connected to the Welsh arth (bear) or possibly to the Latin Artorius (a Roman family name of uncertain origin). The mythological King Arthur, who first appears in Welsh sources from the 6th-9th centuries and was elaborated through medieval romance literature (particularly Geoffrey of Monmouth, 1136), made the name iconic across the English-speaking world.
The Arthurian legend kept the name in continuous British and American use through the medieval period, with peaks corresponding to Arthurian literary revivals — particularly Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1859-1885), which preceded Arthur's late-19th-century American peak. The 1921 peak places the name firmly in the late-Victorian-into-Edwardian American naming aesthetic.
The cohort and the comeback
Arthur's American descent through the 1970s and 1980s tracked the broader cooling of Victorian-coded naming. By 1990 the name was at rank 250 and falling. The reversal began around 2010, alongside the broader vintage-revival wave that brought Henry, Theodore, Oliver, and Edward back into mainstream taste.
Notable bearers across the 20th and 21st centuries include Arthur Miller (1915-2005, playwright of Death of a Salesman), Arthur Ashe (1943-1993, tennis champion and civil rights advocate), Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930, creator of Sherlock Holmes), and the PBS animated series Arthur (1996-2022, based on Marc Brown's books). The PBS series gave the name continuous mainstream visibility through Gen X and millennial childhoods.
The counter-reading: is Arthur too retro?
One frame on Arthur is that the name has become aesthetic shorthand for a specific upper-middle-class American naming sensibility — vintage-revival, literary-coded, signalling specific cultural taste. There's truth to the framing. Arthur's revival has been concentrated in coastal urban naming circles and in households drawn to the broader Henry-Theodore-Edward cluster.
For parents in 2025, the vintage coding is mostly an asset. Arthur reads as deliberately classical without being stuffy, and the Arthurian legend gives the name mythological weight that peer revival names lack. Common nicknames include Art (mid-century coded), Artie (warmer), and Archer or Archie (occasionally used as nickname). Common pairings on naming forums lean traditional: Arthur James, Arthur Henry, Arthur Wolf. Parents weighing Arthur against Henry often pick Arthur for the legendary anchor and the slightly more elaborate phonetic profile. The 1920s data shows where Arthur peaked.