Lady Diana Spencer married at St Paul's in 1981, and that year American parents registered 1,357 more daughters as Diana - the fourth-largest one-year jump in the whole federal record. July 31 is the name's own day.
National Diana Day reaches July 31 unattributed: no person, organisation or campaign is on record as having put it there. A Federal Register search for the exact phrase returns zero documents.
Diana was a Roman goddess of wild animals and the hunt, and Britannica records something unusual about her festival day: the Ides of August, kept at Rome and at Aricia, was a holiday for slaves. National Diana Day carries her name forward, and almost nothing else.
That is not one reference book's flourish. A nineteenth-century classical dictionary hosted by Perseus calls the date the dies servorum, the day of the slaves, and says it was kept every year by slaves of both sexes. It adds that no other festival of Diana is heard of from early Rome.
What survives is the name. This is a name day, unofficial and unsigned, kept for the women and girls who carry the spelling rather than for the goddess who supplied it.
Start with what the word means. Behind the Name glosses Diana as "divine, goddesslike", a derivative of the Latin dia or diva. The job that went with the name was more practical than the gloss suggests, because Britannica records that women invoked her, as a fertility deity, to aid conception and delivery.
Rome's most important temple to her stood on the Aventine hill, said to date back to King Servius Tullius in the sixth century BC. It also worked as a strongbox, holding the foundation charter of the Latin League.
Diana has been in regular use as a given name since the Renaissance. It spread through the English-speaking world after Walter Scott gave a character the name in Rob Roy, published in 1817. George Meredith followed in 1885 with Diana of the Crossways.
The Social Security Administration publishes a count of births by name for every year since 1880, and the figures here come from that file, for the exact spelling Diana. Diane is a separate entry in the same file and is counted separately throughout. Ranks appear only where the agency's own ordinal method and the competition method that ties names together produce the same number.
Two years stand out in that file, and 1981 is the first. Diana gained 1,357 registrations over the year before, the fourth-largest one-year rise in the whole record. Lady Diana Spencer had married the Prince of Wales at St Paul's Cathedral that July.
The second is 1997. Registrations rose that year and again the next, reaching 3,853 before the count fell away.
Diana, Princess of Wales, had died following a car crash in Paris on 31 August. Senators Orrin Hatch and Patrick Leahy put a resolution to the Senate, which agreed to it on 3 September. It designated September 6 a National Day of Recognition for her humanitarian efforts.
That was the day of her funeral, and representatives of the charities she had worked with walked behind her coffin to Westminster Abbey, invited in recognition of her charity work. The name day is a much quieter thing. National Diana Day sits at the far end of this record and arrives without a signature, and nothing in the listings that carry it says who put it on the calendar.
TIMELINE
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
The name's highest American year came before the Princess was born.
The obvious assumption about this day is that its most famous bearer made the name popular. The American birth record puts the name's highest year before she was born, so the day marks something older and larger than one life.
The 1997 resolution named four areas of her work: breast cancer research and treatment, HIV and AIDS including the discrimination around it, banning antipersonnel landmines, and eliminating hopelessness around the world. In the year before her death she was an active campaigner for a landmine ban, visiting Angola in January and landmine projects in Bosnia in August.
No organisation claims this day, and the observance that can actually be documented is personal in scale. On 31 July 2024 a law firm posted the day publicly for its own office manager, a colleague named Diana.
BY THE NUMBERS
GOOD TO KNOW
Britannica says there was probably no original connection between Diana and the moon. She absorbed the identification from the Greek Artemis, along with Artemis's link to Hecate, which is why Latin literature sometimes calls her triformis.
Britannica calls the grove of Diana Nemorensis, or Diana of the Wood, on the shores of Lake Nemi, her most famous place of worship. A custom there held that the priest be a runaway slave who had slain his predecessor in combat.
At Ephesus the Temple of Artemis, also called the Temple of Diana, was counted among the Seven Wonders of the World.
From 1928 through 1970, more American girls were registered as Diane than as Diana. Diana took the lead back in 1971 by three births and has held it every year since.
Section 2 of the 1997 resolution directed the Secretary of the Senate to send an enrolled copy of it to the family of Diana, Princess of Wales.
GET INVOLVED
EDITOR'S PICK
READ
LOOK
FIND
CHECK
Test your knowledge
No. It is an unofficial observance with no legal standing found, so July 31 is an ordinary working day.
COLOPHON
Diane de Poitiers drank gold to stay young, and a 2008 dig at her tomb found deadly levels of it still in her hair. January 26 belongs to the 514,649 American women registered with the French form of the name she carried.
Cynthia began as a place, the rocky hill on Delos where Artemis was born, and her worshippers borrowed it as a nickname for the goddess. June 6 goes to the women who carry it, not to the December name day older calendars keep.
National Danielle Day marks a French name that English took up late and then took up hard. Underneath the spelling is a small Hebrew sentence, dan for judge and El for God, which the name has been saying all along.
