Holiday Calendar

National Grace Day

Next celebratedMonday, November 9, 2026

A Lincoln clerk wrote a Grace into a will in 1530, a hundred years before the Puritans who usually get the credit for the name. November 9 belongs to the virtue name that outlasted Prudence, Charity and Temperance.

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Last updated September 6, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?
YEARLY DATENovember 9
OBSERVED INInternationally
CATEGORYNames
ORIGIN

Community Origin

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

The paper trail begins with one 2022 capture.

No documented founder, organisation or launch announcement has been identified for National Grace Day, and no proclamation or statute naming it was located. Its earliest traceable listing is an Internet Archive capture from August 2022, which dates the listing rather than the day.

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

Puritans named daughters Temperance and Prudence. Grace outlasted them.

National Grace Day falls on November 9, and it honours a name that once had company. A minority of Puritan parents skipped the saints and the scriptures both, handing their daughters plain vocabulary words instead: Prudence, Charity, Constance, Temperance. Almost none of those stuck.

Grace did, and the American record shows by how much. In 75 of the 146 years the Social Security Administration has counted first names, Grace has sat inside the girls' top 50. Faith managed three.

Hope and Joy round out the survivors the reference books name, and neither has ever reached the top 50. Of the eight names in that group, only Grace and Faith ever have. Nobody has left any record of who gave Grace a November date.

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ORIGINS

Grace Day history

CHAPTER 01

A word before a name

Grace starts as Latin. The Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources glosses gratia as favor, goodwill, kindness, gratitude, grace. Elegance and charm, the two meanings most often hung on the name today, are not in that list.

The difference is not pedantry. A virtue name was a plain vocabulary word handed to a child instead of a saint's name, and the word chosen here named something received rather than something possessed. That is a different kind of wish to put on a daughter.

CHAPTER 02

Lincoln, 1530

The dated record runs older than the story usually told about it. DMNES prints a Grace in an English document from 1530, in a volume of Lincoln wills, and then keeps finding her.

Coventry guild records carry a Grace across 1532 and 1533. The Barnstaple parish register in Devon has one from 1542. The register of St Antholin, Budge Row, in London has one from 1543.

These are clerks writing down real people at fonts and gravesides, not writers coining a fashion. Four towns, three kinds of record, thirteen years. Girls called Grace were being baptised, married and buried in English parishes well before the century that gets the credit for the name.

CHAPTER 03

Two reference books, one disagreement

The reference works do not agree on when any of this happened. Behind the Name files Grace among the virtue names created in the 17th century by the Puritans, while the medieval dictionary prints English citations from a hundred years before that and notes that Grace, unlike its companions, turns up abroad earlier still.

Both can be right, about different things. The name is older than the movement credited with it, while its spread through English is genuinely bound up with that movement, and only one of the two books shows its dated receipts.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why National Grace Day Matters

Survival

One vocabulary word survived the habit that produced it.

English parents once gave abstractions as first names, and the habit faded out. Grace is the one piece of it that stayed common, which makes a day attached to the name the easiest way most people will ever meet that history.

Openness

The evidence is free to download

Two national statistics agencies publish the underlying counts themselves, so a claim about this name can be checked rather than repeated. That is unusual in this subject, where assertions travel a great deal better than evidence.

Precision

November 9 is a crowded date

Three unrelated observances share November 9 and a version of this name, and they are routinely merged into one. Telling them apart is the difference between a name day, a peace observance, and a church feast kept for a friar from Kotor.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Grace Day by the Numbers

5,026
Grace birth registrations, England and Wales, 2006
12,781
Grace registrations, US girls, 2003 peak
526
Grace registrations, US girls, 1976 low
No. 13
Grace's best ever US rank for girls

TIMELINE

Timeline

Grace Wisher and the banner

Grace Wisher, indentured to the Baltimore flagmaker Mary Pickersgill since 1810, is believed to have helped make the Star-Spangled Banner. The National Park Service states it as a belief rather than a fact, and she was thought to be about ten when the indenture was signed.

Grace Darling rows out

On 7 September the lighthouse keeper's daughter puts out to the wrecked steamship Forfarshire off the Farne Islands and helps bring nine survivors off. She is 22, and she receives the RNLI's Silver Medal for Gallantry.

The last year in the top 20

Grace spends its last year inside the American top 20 for girls. It stays outside for 91 years, and returns only in 2000.

A moth in the Mark II

Engineers working on the Harvard Mark II find a moth stuck in one of the components. They tape it into their logbook and label it the first actual case of bug being found.

A different Grace day begins

About 40 people on a pilgrimage through Israel and Palestine keep the first Global Grace Day on 9 November, in front of the Israeli separation wall. It is a reconciliation observance, not a name day.

Amazing Grace at the White House

Grace Hopper is named among 21 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients on 16 November, posthumously, for presentation six days later. The citation records that she was known as Amazing Grace and as the first lady of software, and credits her with creating the first compiler.

GOOD TO KNOW

National Grace Day Around the World

Portugal

The oldest dated entry for the name anywhere in the medieval names dictionary is Portuguese, a Latin document of 1217 printed in Antonio Caetano de Sousa's collection of records from the Torre do Tombo archives. Portuguese still carries the name as Graça.

Italy

Italian keeps the name as Grazia, and 9 November is a name day there too. It belongs to Blessed Grazia of Kotor, an Augustinian lay brother who went to sea until he was thirty and died at Murano in 1508. Italian treats Grazia as a woman's name, and he is the rare exception.

France and Spain

Gracia is written down in France in 1287 and in Spain in 1492, both far ahead of anything in the English record. Spanish still carries Gracia and Graciela.

England and Wales

In 2006 Grace was the most popular girls' name in England and Wales. It was also first in England taken on its own, while sitting ninth in Wales the same year. It had been missing from the England and Wales top 100 altogether in the 1944, 1954, 1964, 1974 and 1984 snapshots.

MYTH VS FACT

Common Misconceptions

The myth

Grace Hopper found the first computer bug.

The truth

The Smithsonian, which holds the 1947 logbook with the moth taped into it, says otherwise. Its object record notes that American engineers had been calling machine flaws bugs for over a century, with Thomas Edison talking about bugs in electrical circuits in the 1870s, and that this log book was probably not Hopper's. What it does credit her and the rest of the Mark II team with is popularising the words bug and debug.

The myth

Grace is as popular in America now as it was in Victorian times.

The truth

Its rank came back; its reach did not. In 1890 about 1,197 girls in every 100,000 registered were named Grace, against about 700 per 100,000 in 2003, the year it drew level with 1890 on rank. The name returned to the position it once held without returning to the share.

The myth

Gracie is just a short form, so it counts as Grace in the rankings.

The truth

Not in the official statistics. The Office for National Statistics ranks on the exact spelling given at birth registration and does not group similar names, so Gracie runs as its own entry with its own curve: 783rd in England and Wales in 1996, 51st by 2010, 84th in 2023.

GET INVOLVED

How to Observe National Grace Day

EDITOR'S PICK

Download the registry file and look up a birth year

The Social Security Administration's national file covers every year from 1880, and the Office for National Statistics publishes the England and Wales tables. Find where the name sat in the year a Grace you know was born.

SEND

Send a Grace her own number

One line is enough: the rank her name held the year she was born, and the count behind it. It is a specific, checkable thing to send instead of a generic greeting.

READ

Read the logbook page for yourself

The Smithsonian's object record for the 1947 log book is online with photographs of the taped moth, and it sets out plainly what the museum can and cannot attribute.

VISIT

Visit the museum at Bamburgh

The RNLI has run a museum on the site since 1938 for Grace Darling, in the Northumberland village of Bamburgh where she was born. Her personal items are there, including letters, family portraits and the famous coble used in the rescue.

LOOK

Look up a Grace nobody wrote down

The National Park Service page for Grace Wisher records both what is known and what is only believed. At the Star-Spangled Banner Flag House a well known painting of the household leaves her out, so the museum drew a ghost figure on the plexiglass over it.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Grace Day?

1 / 8

In which single year did Grace top the England and Wales girls' list?

Answer

No. It has no legal standing anywhere that could be found, and a search of the Federal Register for the exact phrase returns no documents at all.

COLOPHON

Sources

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

13sources
10primary records
4independently dated
Primary records
U.S. Social Security Administration2026
National data on baby names (names.zip, yob1880 to yob2025)
The agency's own annual counts of every first name on U.S. Social Security card applications, by sex, from 1880 to 2025. Every American figure on this page is computed from the complete 146 year series in this file.
View source
Office for National Statistics
Baby names in England and Wales: 1996 to 2025
Rank and count for every first name registered for babies in England and Wales each year since 1996, ranked on the exact spelling given at birth registration with no grouping of variants. The source of the 2006 result and of the separate Gracie series.
View source
Office for National Statistics31 July 2025
Top 100 baby names in England and Wales: historical data, 1904 to 2024
Decade spaced top 100 rankings for England and Wales across the twentieth century, which is where the name's disappearance from the list between 1944 and 1984 and its return by 2004 can be read directly.
View source
Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources2016
Grace, edited by S. L. Uckelman, Edition 2016 no. 3
A scholarly edition of dated name attestations drawn from published primary records. It gives the Latin root and its sense, the English citations from 1530 onward with their towns, and the earlier continental entries from Portugal, Italy, France and Spain.
View source
Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History
Log Book With Computer Bug
The museum's catalogue record for the 1947 Harvard Mark II logbook with a moth taped into it, including its statement that the term bug long predates the moth and its caution about whose logbook it actually was.
View source
The White House, Office of the Press Secretary16 November 2016
President Obama Names Recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom
The announcement naming 21 recipients for presentation on 22 November 2016, with the citation for Grace Hopper describing her rank, her compiler work and the nicknames attached to her.
View source
U.S. National Park Service
Grace Wisher, Star-Spangled Banner National Historic Trail
The federal steward's account of Wisher's 1810 indenture to Mary Pickersgill, what is believed about her part in making the flag, and the ghost figure the Flag House added over a painting that omits her.
View source
Royal National Lifeboat Institution
1838: Grace Darling
The institution's own history of the Forfarshire rescue, with Darling's birth and death dates, her upbringing in the Farne Islands lighthouses and the medals that followed.
View source
Royal National Lifeboat Institution
RNLI Grace Darling Museum, Bamburgh
The museum's own page, giving the number of survivors brought off, Darling's age at the rescue, the Silver Medal for Gallantry and the museum's opening on that site in 1938.
View source
Sabine Lichtenfels
Grace Pilgrimages and Global Grace Day
The founder's own account of the first Grace Pilgrimage in 2005, the first Global Grace Day kept in front of the Israeli separation wall, and the two twentieth century anniversaries the organisers give as their reason for the date.
View source
Additional coverage
Behind the Name
Meaning, origin and history of the name Grace
A reference entry deriving the name from Latin gratia and attributing it to seventeenth century Puritan virtue naming, with the diminutive Gracie and the Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish forms.
View source
Behind the Name
Puritan Names
The glossary entry that defines virtue names and names the specific ones used, which is what fixes the comparison group measured against the American series on this page.
View source
Santi e Beati
Beato Grazia (Graziano) da Cattaro
The hagiographical entry for the Augustinian lay brother from the Bay of Kotor whose feast on 9 November is the Italian name day for Grazia, including the confirmation of his cult in 1889.
View source
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