The practice of giving personal names to tropical storms traces back to the mid-1890s, when an Australian meteorologist named Clement Wragge began labeling cyclones in the southern hemisphere. But the formal, systematic naming of Atlantic hurricanes that most people are familiar with didn’t begin until 1953, when the United States Weather Bureau adopted a standardized list of women’s names. The story between those two milestones, and everything that followed, is stranger and more politically charged than most people realize.
How Storms Were Tracked Before Names
For most of recorded history, people identified hurricanes by when and where they hit. A storm might be called “the Great Hurricane of 1780” or “the Galveston Hurricane of 1900.” In the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, storms were often named after the saint’s day on which they made landfall, which is how Puerto Rico ended up with two separate disasters both called “San Felipe” (1876 and 1928). This approach worked passably when only one or two major storms struck a region each season, but it fell apart in busy years when multiple storms tracked across the same waters within days of each other. Forecasters trying to issue warnings for one system while another was still active found it genuinely dangerous to rely on geographic descriptions alone, since a storm’s location changes by the hour.
By the late nineteenth century, weather services in the United States, Australia, and the Caribbean were all grappling with this communication problem. Latitude-longitude coordinates were precise but useless for the general public. Numbering storms sequentially was better but still easy to confuse in telegraphed warnings. What forecasters needed was a quick, distinctive label that anyone could remember and nobody would mix up.
Clement Wragge and the First Named Storms
The person widely credited with solving that problem was Clement Lindley Wragge, the government meteorologist for Queensland, Australia. He apparently began naming tropical cyclones in the mid-1890s, working through names in alphabetical order. He started with the Greek alphabet, then moved to characters from Greek and Roman mythology, then women’s names, and eventually the names of politicians he disliked (and occasionally ones he admired, along with public figures such as the opera singer Nellie Melba).1Snopes. What We Know About Why Hurricanes Have Names Wragge’s habit of attaching the names of politicians he found objectionable to destructive storms was, by most accounts, deliberate and gleeful. If a cyclone named after a particular legislator caused widespread damage, so much the better for Wragge’s commentary on that person’s character.
Wragge left his government post in 1902, and the practice of naming storms largely died with his tenure. For the next several decades, tropical cyclones in most parts of the world went back to being identified by date, location, or sequential number. But Wragge had proved the concept: a personal name made a storm instantly recognizable and easy to discuss, especially when multiple systems were active at once.
World War II and the Revival of Storm Names
The idea resurfaced during the Second World War. U.S. Army Air Corps and Navy meteorologists, tasked with tracking weather across the vast Pacific theater, began informally using women’s names to distinguish between simultaneous tropical systems. The practice likely drew from the military’s broader habit of assigning feminine names to equipment and operations, though some accounts credit the influence of George R. Stewart’s 1941 novel Storm, in which a meteorologist names a Pacific weather system “Maria.” Whatever the exact inspiration, the convention stuck among military forecasters and crossed over into civilian use after the war.
In 1950, the U.S. Weather Bureau tried a compromise: it began identifying Atlantic tropical storms using the military’s phonetic alphabet (Able, Baker, Charlie, and so on). That system lasted exactly three years before the bureau switched in 1953 to a single alphabetical list of women’s names, one list per season. The phonetic-alphabet approach had caused confusion in busy seasons when the same names recycled across years, and frankly, personal names were just easier for radio listeners to catch and remember.
Why the Names Stopped Being All Female
From 1953 through 1978, every Atlantic hurricane carried a woman’s name. The reasoning at the time was largely practical rather than deliberately sexist: forecasters had already been using female names informally for years, and the public was accustomed to the convention. But by the 1970s, feminist groups and individual critics had begun pointing out that exclusively associating destructive, unpredictable natural disasters with women was, at minimum, a bad look. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology had already started alternating male and female names for its cyclones in the mid-1970s.
In 1979, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the U.S. National Hurricane Center adopted alternating male and female names for Atlantic storms. The Eastern North Pacific basin followed the same year. The change was uncontroversial in practice: forecasters simply added men’s names to the existing alphabetical lists, and the public adapted without much fuss. Today, six rotating lists of names are maintained by the WMO for the Atlantic basin. Each list is used once every six years and then recycled, so the names you hear in one season will come back around six years later unless a name gets retired.
How the Name Lists Work
The WMO’s naming lists follow a few consistent rules. Names alternate between male and female. They proceed alphabetically through the season, so the first named storm of the year gets an A-name, the second a B-name, and so on. The letters Q, U, X, Y, and Z are skipped in the Atlantic lists because too few common names start with those letters. Each of the world’s tropical cyclone basins maintains its own set of lists, and those lists reflect the languages and cultures of the countries in that region. Atlantic names include English, Spanish, and French names. Western Pacific typhoons draw from a pool submitted by fourteen countries and often include words for flowers, animals, or natural features rather than personal names.
If a season produces more named storms than the list can accommodate (which happened in 2005 and 2020), the WMO used to switch to Greek letters. That changed after the historically active 2020 season, when the use of Greek letters caused tracking confusion and public communication problems. Starting in 2021, a supplemental list of names was created as an overflow, so Alpha and Beta are no longer drafted into hurricane duty.
When a Hurricane Loses Its Name Forever
The most well-known feature of the naming system is probably the retirement of names. When a storm is so deadly or destructive that reusing its name would be insensitive or confusing, the WMO’s Regional Association IV Hurricane Committee votes to retire the name permanently. A replacement name starting with the same letter is chosen for the next cycle. Katrina, Sandy, Maria, Harvey, and Irma are all retired, and their names will never again be assigned to an Atlantic hurricane.
The bar for retirement is informal but fairly high. Not every damaging storm loses its name, and the decision involves some judgment about public perception and the severity of impact. Some seasons produce no retirements; 2005 produced five (Dennis, Katrina, Rita, Stan, and Wilma). Over the decades, the list of retired names has become a kind of informal record of the worst storms in Atlantic hurricane history. The retired name is, in effect, a marker that says a storm was bad enough to be remembered permanently.
Do the Names Themselves Change How People Respond?
A provocative 2014 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argued that hurricanes with female names killed more people than those with male names, not because of meteorological differences, but because the public perceived female-named storms as less threatening and took fewer precautions. The researchers used lab experiments showing that hurricane names led to gender-based expectations about severity, which in turn influenced how willing people said they were to evacuate or take protective action.2PubMed Central. Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes
The study generated enormous media attention, but the statistical analysis was immediately challenged by other researchers. A response published in the same journal that year found no evidence of gender bias in the public’s actual hurricane preparedness behavior when the data were analyzed differently.3PubMed Central. Statistics show no evidence of gender bias in the public’s hurricane preparedness Critics pointed out that the original study’s historical dataset included decades when all hurricanes had female names, making it impossible to cleanly separate the effect of name gender from the effect of era (older storms, with fewer forecasting tools and evacuation systems, were deadlier for many reasons). The question remains genuinely unresolved, though most atmospheric scientists and emergency managers treat the name-gender effect as, at best, a minor curiosity rather than a policy-relevant finding. The real determinants of hurricane fatalities are forecast accuracy, infrastructure, poverty, and whether people have a viable way to evacuate.
Naming Conventions in Other Ocean Basins
The Atlantic system gets the most attention in American and European media, but every major tropical cyclone basin in the world has its own naming protocol, and they differ in interesting ways. In the Western North Pacific, the fourteen member countries of the WMO’s Typhoon Committee each submit ten names to a shared pool. These names rotate sequentially regardless of year, so the list does not reset at the start of each season the way Atlantic lists do. Many of the names are not personal names at all: Haiyan (submitted by Vietnam) means “petrel,” Mangkhut (Thailand) means “mangosteen,” and Hagibis (Philippines) means “speed.” This reflects a deliberate cultural choice, since several contributing countries found it inappropriate to attach personal names to disasters.
In the North Indian Ocean, the system was overhauled in 2004 after decades of storms being identified only by number. Eight countries bordering the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea now contribute names in a rotating sequence. As in the Western Pacific, many are descriptive words rather than personal names: Amphan (Thailand) means “sky,” Tauktae (Myanmar) is a Burmese word for a highly vocal gecko, and Biparjoy (Bangladesh) means “disaster,” which has a certain grim aptness. The Southern Hemisphere uses separate lists for the Australian region, the South Pacific, and the South-West Indian Ocean, each administered by the relevant national meteorological service or regional WMO body.
One genuinely odd outlier: the Central North Pacific basin, which covers the waters around Hawaii, has its own list of Hawaiian names that rotate without regard to year. Because that basin sees relatively few tropical cyclones, the same list can last for years before cycling. A Hawaiian storm named Iniki devastated Kauai in 1992, and the name was retired, but the list otherwise moves at a leisurely pace compared to the Atlantic’s annual churn.
Storms That Predate the System but Still Have Names
Even before formal naming, a few storms acquired personal names through public usage and historical documentation. The “Okeechobee Hurricane” of 1928 is sometimes called “San Felipe II” in Puerto Rico. The 1938 “Long Island Express” was named retrospectively by journalists. These informal names were applied after the fact by the communities that experienced the storms, not by forecasters. The distinction matters because it reflects a universal human instinct: people name things that affect their lives profoundly. The formal meteorological naming system harnessed that instinct and standardized it, but it did not invent it.
This is also why the public occasionally rejects or supplements the official name. Hurricane Katrina is universally known by its WMO-assigned name, but some storms are better remembered by their nicknames. The “Perfect Storm” of 1991 was formally an unnamed subtropical and then tropical system (it briefly received the name “Grace” at an earlier stage, which adds to the confusion). Superstorm Sandy officially lost its “Hurricane” prefix when it transitioned to a post-tropical cyclone before landfall, but no one in New Jersey or New York accepted “Post-Tropical Cyclone Sandy” as a reasonable thing to call a storm that flooded the subway system. The gap between official meteorological terminology and public memory is a permanent feature of the naming landscape.
Names That Almost Ran Out
The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season remains the benchmark for name exhaustion. That year produced twenty-eight named storms, blowing through the entire standard list and six Greek letters (Alpha through Zeta). The 2020 season matched this feat, reaching Iota on the supplemental Greek list. Both seasons forced the WMO to confront the practical limits of its naming system, and the 2021 rule change creating a supplemental list of actual names (rather than Greek letters) was a direct consequence. The WMO cited confusion stemming from Greek letter names, particularly the difficulty of distinguishing between storms like Eta and Theta in spoken communication, and the complications that arose when multiple Greek-letter storms needed to be retired (since you cannot really retire a letter of the Greek alphabet and replace it with a different one).
Climate scientists have noted that the frequency of named storms is partly a function of better observational technology. Short-lived tropical storms that would have gone unnoticed fifty years ago are now detected by satellite and named. Whether the Atlantic is actually producing more storms than in previous decades, or whether we are simply counting ones we used to miss, remains an active area of research. That ambiguity means the question of whether we will need even longer supplemental lists in the future is tangled up with broader questions about observation, classification, and climate change.