Annie
- Pronunciation
- [A-nnie]
- Gender
- Female
- Meaning
- Prayer
- Origin
- Hebrew
About the Name Annie
Annie originated as an English short form of Anna (see separate entry on Anna for the Hebrew Channah etymology meaning "grace"). Annie has been used as a casual diminutive of Anna and Anne in English-speaking countries since at least the 18th century, transitioning from nickname to standalone first name in 19th-century American naming.
The name's most influential late-19th-century cultural anchor is American sharpshooter Annie Oakley (Phoebe Ann Mosey, 1860–1926), the legendary American Western performer whose feats with rifle made her one of the first major American female celebrities; her name became immortalized through the Irving Berlin musical Annie Get Your Gun (1946) and the long-running American myth of the female Western performer. Other notable bearers include the fictional Little Orphan Annie (the comic strip character introduced 1924, the 1977 Broadway musical, the 1982 and 2014 films), and contemporary American Annie Leibovitz (the iconic celebrity photographer).
Annie held a US top-100 girls' rank from 1880 through 1932 — over five decades of late-Victorian and Edwardian-era popularity. After a long mid-20th-century quiet period, the name has been climbing again through the 2010s as part of the broader vintage-revival wave. Annie climbed from outside the US top 500 in 2000 to the US top 200 girls' rank by 2014 and the top 200 since. The name's appeal is its compact warm register — two short syllables, soft consonants, instantly readable, and the in-built friendly-vintage-Annie-Get-Your-Gun cultural register. The name reads as both classical-vintage and contemporary approachable. Common nicknames are scarce since Annie is itself a nickname-shape — Ann, Anne, and the rare Annie-bell each occasionally appear; the longer formal Anna or Anne is sometimes used as Annie's official-document version. International variants are minimal since the name is essentially English-language; the related Anna family across European languages provides adjacent cultural anchors.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Annie
US Popularity History (1880–2025)
Annual US births named Annie by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1922 with 7,476 girls named Annie (girl rank #30 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #182 for girls (1,690 US births). That's 152 places below its 1922 peak.
Source: US Social Security Administration. Limitations: US birth-certificate data only; names appearing fewer than 5 times in a given year are suppressed for privacy; spelling variants are counted separately. For names that ranked outside the US top 100 before year 2000, only the years they reached the top 100 are shown — the chart may have gaps for less-popular historical names.
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Where in the US Is Annie Most Popular?
Average girl-name rank within each state across 2016–2025 SSA records. A lower number means the name appears closer to the top of that state's girls-name rankings — a per-capita measure that isn't biased toward large states. For Annie the strongest states are Utah, Montana, Maine.
Strongest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Utah | #107 | 347 |
| 2 | Montana | #113 | 27 |
| 3 | Maine | #137 | 40 |
| 4 | Mississippi | #151 | 180 |
| 5 | Louisiana | #155 | 295 |
| 6 | South Dakota | #158 | 22 |
| 7 | Tennessee | #162 | 417 |
| 8 | Alabama | #169 | 290 |
| 9 | Kentucky | #173 | 254 |
| 10 | North Dakota | #187 | 28 |
Weakest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Florida | #472 | 360 |
| 2 | New Jersey | #462 | 183 |
| 3 | Nevada | #394 | 44 |
| 4 | Arizona | #382 | 173 |
| 5 | Michigan | #373 | 228 |
| 6 | Maryland | #359 | 151 |
| 7 | Virginia | #328 | 247 |
| 8 | California | #321 | 1,050 |
| 9 | Connecticut | #321 | 85 |
| 10 | New York | #311 | 520 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Annie in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
Famous People Named Annie
2 notable figures from history and culture who share the name Annie.
- Annie Leibovitz — Photographer (1949)
- Annie Lennox — Pop Singer (1954)
Looking for names like Annie?
A dedicated page with 60+ related names — spelling variants, rhymes, alliterations, same-origin matches, and shared meaning concepts — lives at its own URL so each kind of similarity gets a deeper treatment than fits here.
Compare Annie to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Annie against today's most popular girls-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).
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