Holiday Calendar

National Janet Day

Next celebratedSaturday, June 5, 2027

Hurricane Janet took the name off the Atlantic list for good in 1955, and the reconnaissance flight sent into it on 26 September was never found. June 5 hands the name back to the living Janets.

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Last updated September 6, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?
YEARLY DATEJune 5
OBSERVED INInternationally
CATEGORYNames
ORIGIN

Community Origin

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

A date that circulates on its own.

Research traced National Janet Day no further than holiday listings and dated posts marking it on June 5. Who first proposed the day, and when, is not on any record located.

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

486 Janets in Scotland's record of accused witches

Scotland's surviving record of witchcraft accusations names 3,212 people. 486 of them were called Janet, more than carried any other name in the file. National Janet Day belongs to a name with that kind of record behind it.

The number is not a fact about Janets. It is a fact about how ordinary the name once was in Scotland. The register that counts Scottish newborns has not listed it once since 2000.

National Records of Scotland suppresses any baby name given to two or fewer children in a year. So the absence is a ceiling, not a zero. At most two Scottish girls a year have been registered Janet since.

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ORIGINS

Janet Day history

INTRODUCTION

Walter Scott's collection of ballads was gathered, as its own title page has it, in the southern counties of Scotland. One of the pieces in its second volume is 'The Young Tamlane', and its heroine is a young woman called Janet.

She goes to Carterhaugh, in Selkirkshire, against every warning in the opening verse. Scott's text names her twenty-four times.

CHAPTER 01

What the parish clerks wrote

Beith, in North Ayrshire, kept baptism registers through the 1700s. A study of 7,035 of those entries found Janet the third most common girl's name in the parish, behind Margaret and Jean.

The concentration was severe. Ten names covered 91.61% of the girls baptised there. A daughter of that parish was more likely than not to answer to one of a small handful of names, with Janet near the top of it.

CHAPTER 02

The spelling the clerks reached for

In the courts the name was set down far more loosely. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft files all the variants under Janet, but the original documents more often read Jonet. The earliest Janet in the file is a woman from Selkirk, Janet Trumbill, entered on 23 December 1561.

The cases gather in the record's worst stretches. The heaviest year anywhere in it was 1662. Fifty-six of the 407 cases brought across Scotland that year were against a Janet.

CHAPTER 03

A day that arrived without a maker

National Janet Day sits at the end of all that with a far thinner paper trail. What can be verified is that people mark it: the London newsroom MyLondon posted for it on 5 June 2025.

That post is close to the whole documented life of the observance. The name has four centuries of Scottish paperwork behind it. The day has a date and the people who use it.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why National Janet Day Matters

WEATHER

The name was withdrawn from the Atlantic storm list in 1955.

Janet sits on the National Hurricane Center's list of Atlantic storm names withdrawn from reuse, taken off after the 1955 season. NOAA's own account records that the reconnaissance flight sent into that storm on 26 September was never found, the only such flight ever lost in an Atlantic hurricane.

OFFICE

The first person to hold all three posts

The US Treasury's own announcement of Janet Yellen's swearing-in in January 2021 called her the first woman to lead the department in its 231-year history. It also called her the first person to have served as Treasury Secretary, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Chair of the Federal Reserve.

SPEED

The first woman to qualify at Indianapolis

Janet Guthrie qualified 26th for the Indianapolis 500 in 1977, the first female qualifier in the race's history. She finished ninth the following year after cracking her wrist in a charity tennis match two days before the race.

TIMELINE

Timeline

The first Janet in the record

Janet Trumbill of Selkirk is the earliest dated Janet among Scotland's accused, entered on 23 December.

Scotland's heaviest year of cases

407 witchcraft cases were brought across the country, more than in any other year in the survey.

The last dated case

The final dated entry in Scotland's witchcraft survey, from June, is against a woman named Janet Horne.

Scott prints fair Janet

Walter Scott includes 'The Young Tamlane' in the third edition of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.

Scotland's name series begins

The national record of babies' first names opens, and Janet is on it from the first year.

The last year on the list

Four girls in Scotland were registered Janet, ranking the name 525th for the year.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Janet Day by the Numbers

194
Records spelling the name Jonet, 1563-1736
14.37%
Girls baptised Janet, Beith parish, 1701-1800
167,520
US girls named Janet in the 1950s
84th
Janet's rank in Scotland, 1974

GET INVOLVED

How to Observe National Janet Day

EDITOR'S PICK

Read the survey that holds those names

The University of Edinburgh's Survey of Scottish Witchcraft runs a plain-language introduction to Scottish witchcraft alongside its database. The database itself is deposited as an open dataset that anyone can download.

READ

Read the ballad Walter Scott collected

'The Young Tamlane' sits in the second volume of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, free to read in full. Scott prints it in Scots, so read it aloud and it gets a good deal easier to follow.

COMPARE

Compare the name's US and Scottish records

The Social Security Administration publishes the most popular US names by decade, and National Records of Scotland publishes the Scottish figures year by year. Open the two and you get two different shapes for the same name.

LEARN

Learn to say Seonaid, the Gaelic form

Seonaid is the Scottish Gaelic form of Janet, and it sounds nothing like the English spelling suggests. The entry carries the pronunciation.

ASK

Ask a Janet who she was named for

Ask a Janet you know who she was named after, and what her family actually calls her. A name day is one of the few prompts anyone ever gets for that conversation.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Janet Day?

1 / 5

In which decade was Janet at its most popular in the United States?

Answer

No. It is an unofficial observance with no official recognition on record, so it is a normal working day.

COLOPHON

Sources

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

13sources
11primary records
7independently dated
Primary records
National Records of Scotland2026-05
Babies' First Names, 2025
Every first name registered in Scotland by year, count and rank, 1974 onwards.
View source
University of Edinburgh2010
Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, 1563-1736 (dataset)
The deposited database of everyone known to have been accused of witchcraft in Scotland.
View source
Survey of Scottish Witchcraft
Introduction to Scottish witchcraft
The project's own headline counts, including how many of the accused are named.
View source
Journal of Scottish Name Studies
Personal Names in 18th-Century Scotland: a case study of the parish of Beith
Alice Crook's count of 7,035 baptisms and the ten names that covered the parish.
View source
U.S. Social Security Administration
Top names of the 1950s
The 200 most popular US given names of the decade, with births behind each.
View source
U.S. Department of the Treasury2021-01-26
Janet L. Yellen Sworn In As 78th Secretary of the United States Department of the Treasury
The department's statement on the day Yellen took the oath of office.
View source
NOAA National Hurricane Center
Tropical Cyclone Naming History and Retired Names
The official list of Atlantic storm names withdrawn from reuse, by season.
View source
NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory2015-09-25
60th Anniversary of Navy Hurricane Hunter lost in storm
NOAA's account of the 1955 flight into Hurricane Janet that was never found.
View source
Project Gutenberg1806
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II
Walter Scott's ballad collection, including the full text of 'The Young Tamlane'.
View source
Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum2020
Janet Guthrie, Hall of Fame inductee
The museum's record of Guthrie's qualification in 1977 and her ninth place in 1978.
View source
MyLondon2025-06-05
It is National Janet Day today
A London newsroom marking the day on the morning of 5 June 2025.
View source
Additional coverage
Behind the Name
Janet
The name's classification as a medieval English diminutive of Jane.
View source
Behind the Name
Seonaid
Seonaid as the Scottish Gaelic form of Janet, with its pronunciation.
View source
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