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National Annie Day

Next celebratedTuesday, January 19, 2027

Everyone named Annie is celebrating a Hebrew word for grace. Ḥanna became Hannah, Hannah became Anna, Anna became Anne, and Anne wore down to the nickname that now has the day.

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Last updated September 7, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?
YEARLY DATEJanuary 19
OBSERVED INUnited States
CATEGORYNames
ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY
Not documented
FIRST OBSERVED
Not documented
HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

Listings carry it; no record explains it.

No founder, proclamation, or sponsoring organization has been documented for National Annie Day, and the phrase does not appear in the Federal Register. What circulates is the day itself, on holiday-listing pages, with nothing behind it.

+ Know the story? Submit a founder Help us complete this holiday
INTRO

Seventh in Northern Ireland and 182nd in the United States

National Annie Day belongs to a name that two governments cannot agree about. Northern Ireland's statistics agency ranked Annie seventh among girls registered there in 2025. The United States ranked it 182nd.

That gap is not just an artifact of counting in a small country. Between 0.85 and 1.25 percent of girls registered in Northern Ireland that year were named Annie, against roughly 0.11 percent in the United States. The Northern Irish figure is a range rather than a number because the registry suppresses its long tail of rare names, and even the bottom of that range is at least eight times the American share.

What nobody can say is who decided the name deserved a day. There is no founder on record, no proclamation, and no organization standing behind it.

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ORIGINS

Annie Day history

INTRODUCTION

In 1970 the name reached the lowest rank in 146 years of American records. Annie stood 441st, 433 places below where it had stood in 1881. Two years later only 438 American girls were given it.

It had reached English by a long route. Behind the Name files Annie as a diminutive of Anne, Anne as the French form of Anna, and Anna as the form of Hannah used in the Greek and Latin Old Testament. Hannah is the Hebrew Ḥanna, meaning favour and grace, from a root meaning to be gracious.

CHAPTER 01

A girl with a rifle in Darke County

One woman carrying the name was born Phoebe Ann Moses in Darke County, Ohio, in 1860, and called Annie by her family. She shot small game for a Greenville grocery, which resold it to hotels and restaurants in Cincinnati. By 15 she had earned enough to clear the $200 mortgage on her mother's house.

A Cincinnati hotel owner who had been buying her game put her up against a touring marksman named Frank E. Butler. She hit 25 of 25, and Butler missed one. He married her in 1876.

She took the stage name Oakley in 1882, the first time she and Butler appeared in a show together. At a performance in St. Paul two years later, Sitting Bull met her and called her Little Sure Shot.

CHAPTER 02

Twenty-eight years near the top

The name's own run began in 1880, five years before Oakley joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West, and it held a place inside America's twenty most popular girls' names for 28 consecutive years. It ended in 1907. Annie slipped to 21st in 1908, climbed back to 19th in 1910, and has never been that high again.

CHAPTER 03

A recovery, and a day nobody claims

Then it turned. Annie has improved its American ranking in every single year since 2018, and in 2025 it reached its highest standing since 1956.

The day attached to it has no such record. Nobody has ever been identified as having started it, and the phrase is absent from the Federal Register. Its earliest dated trace anywhere is an Internet Archive capture of a holiday-listing page from August 2022, which dates the listing rather than the day.

GOOD TO KNOW

National Annie Day Around the World

Northern Ireland

112th in 1997 and 47th in 2010, on a climb that has since carried Annie into the top ten

Ireland

123rd in 1997 and 107th in 2010, on a slower version of the same climb, reaching 33rd by 2025

United States

317th in 1997 and lower still at 392nd in 2010, the only one of these three registries to lose ground over that stretch

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love National Annie Day

COUNTING

Count Annie together with Anne and it climbs 68 places.

Treat Annie as a name in its own right and it sits 68 places lower in the 2025 American rankings than it does when Ann and Anne are folded in with it. In Northern Ireland the same choice barely moves it, because Ann and Anne were each given to fewer than three babies there.

SCIENCE

It recalls a career Harvard was slow to name

Annie Jump Cannon was the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Oxford and the first elected woman officer of the American Astronomical Society, and she was named Curator of Astronomical Photographs in 1911. Harvard itself gave her a regular appointment, as William C. Bond Astronomer, only in 1938, two years before she retired.

ENGINEERING

It points at 34 years of NASA code

Annie Easley joined the laboratory that became NASA Glenn in 1955 as a human computer, one of only four African-American employees there, and stayed 34 years, writing code for energy-conversion systems and for the Centaur upper-stage rocket. In a 2001 interview she put it plainly: "if I can't work with you, I will work around you."

BY THE NUMBERS

National Annie Day by the Numbers

91
Girls registered as Annie, Northern Ireland 2025
1,690
US girls named Annie in 2025
360,253
US girls named Annie since 1880
7,476
Most US Annies in one year, 1922

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate National Annie Day

EDITOR'S PICK

Look the name up in a national registry

Northern Ireland's statistics agency publishes every first forename given since 1997, with its count and rank, in one downloadable table. Open the Baby Names 2025 release and track a name year by year from 1997 on.

PLAN

Plan a July trip to Darke County, Ohio

The Annie Oakley Festival runs from 24 to 26 July in 2026, in the county where she was born. Its headline event is a marksmanship contest for entrants aged 12 to 19, each shooting the same BB gun from 25 feet and moving back five feet every round.

ASK

Ask the Annies you know how they were named

Registry tables show how many people received a name, never why any one family chose it. Ask the Annies in your life who they were named after, and write the answer down.

READ

Read Harvard's record of its observatory women

The Wolbach Library, at the institution that holds her papers, keeps a research guide to Annie Jump Cannon. Start there rather than with a summary, and you get the record Harvard itself keeps on the women who worked at its observatory.

COUNT

Count the name yourself from the raw files

The Social Security Administration publishes one plain text file per birth year, name by name, and the whole set travels as a single archived bundle. Sort any year by count and you can reproduce every American figure on this page yourself.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Annie Day?

1 / 8

Where did Annie rank among girls' names in Northern Ireland in 2025?

Answer

No. It is an unofficial observance with no official recognition on record, so January 19 is an ordinary working day.

COLOPHON

Sources

How we know what’s on this page. References, not endorsements.

9sources
8primary records
4independently dated
Primary records
Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency2026-04-16
Baby Names 2025
The official ranking of first forenames given to babies registered in Northern Ireland in 2025, printing Annie at seventh place with 91 babies, together with the full name list back to 1997 and the agency's own counting rules.
View source
Social Security Administration2026
Beyond the Top 1000 Names: national baby name data files
One plain text file for every birth year from 1880 to 2025, listing each name with its count and sex. Every American rank, count and share on this page was computed from it, and checked against the agency's own published decade tables. Cited as the Internet Archive capture because the agency blocks automated downloads of the live file.
View source
Central Statistics Office2026-02-27
Irish Babies' Names 2025
Annual counts and ranks for every girls' name registered in the Republic of Ireland with three or more occurrences, running from 1964 to 2025, and the source of Annie's Irish trajectory.
View source
NASA
Annie Easley
The Glenn Research Center biography of Annie Easley, covering her 34-year career from 1955, her hiring as one of only four African-American employees at the laboratory, her code for energy-conversion systems and the Centaur upper stage, and her own words from a 2001 interview.
View source
Wolbach Library, Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian
Annie Jump Cannon
Harvard's own research guide to Annie Jump Cannon, recording her 44-year career, her Oxford honorary doctorate and her office in the American Astronomical Society as firsts for a woman, her 1911 curatorship, and the 1938 appointment as William C. Bond Astronomer.
View source
Buffalo Bill Center of the West
Annie Oakley
The museum biography by Anne Marie Shriver, covering Oakley's birth as Phoebe Ann Moses in 1860, the $200 mortgage she cleared at fifteen, the match against Frank Butler, her marriage, the naming by Sitting Bull, and her seventeen years with Buffalo Bill's Wild West.
View source
Annie Oakley Festival2026
Free Open-air Festival, Greenville Ohio
The festival's own site, giving the 2026 dates of 24 to 26 July in Greenville, Ohio, and the rules of its marksmanship contest for entrants aged 12 to 19.
View source
Office of the Federal Register
Federal Register documents search
The federal document index. It returns no documents for the exact phrase National Annie Day.
View source
Additional coverage
Behind the Name
Meaning, origin and history of the name Annie
The etymology, filing Annie as a diminutive of Anne, together with a published United States ranking for 2025 that independently matches the rank computed here from the Social Security files.
View source
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