https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/interactive/2025/hurricane-names-list-storm-naming/

We saw eight tropical storms or hurricanes named Beryl between 1982 and 2024, yet never a Mortimer. Hurricane Sandy stormed through in 2012, but there won’t be a Nixon any time soon. When it comes to naming a hurricane, not every name has what it takes.

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A tropical cyclone is named once it reaches tropical storm status (39 mph wind speeds). The World Meteorological Organization oversees the naming process and requires that monikers be short, easy to pronounce, noncontroversial and unique so that they don’t overlap with storms in other regions.

That’s why straightforward choices like Laura and Ida are staples. Even a slightly longer pick, such as Gabrielle, has been used. But Bartholomew or Theophilus can be a mouthful, and in a crisis, brief and clear communication is key.

Hurricane naming favors brevity

Most hurricanes in the Atlantic and North Pacific are given short names, typically between 4 and 6 characters.

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33

3 characters

151

4 characters

167

5 characters

140

6 characters

71

7 characters

31

8 characters

14

9 characters

Location matters, too. Storms in the Atlantic and Eastern North Pacific basins get their names from 12 rotating lists — six per basin — that are maintained by a WMO committee. Names on each list are arranged alphabetically, and they alternate by gender. Those lists rotate each year, so the 2025 lists won’t be used again until 2031. In the Central North Pacific basin, names are chosen from one of four lists of Hawaiian names.

Finally, storm names have to navigate around political and historical sensitivities that change with time, said Liz Skilton, an author and historian who studies hurricane naming conventions.

“You wouldn’t see a Hurricane Hitler or Hurricane Adolf,” she said.

“There isn’t a detailed description of how they assess each criterion,” Skilton added. “It’s up to these committees … names are promoted, and put into a kind of a hat … then they select them for 10 years out.”

Altogether, 318 names are available — 158 male, 160 female — plus an additional list of alternates if all the names on a list are used up in a year.

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Why name hurricanes in the first place?

Tracking storms was a messy business before today’s tidy lists and categories.

In the late 19th century, Australian meteorologist Clement Wragge began naming storms in the Pacific — first after mythological figures, then after South Sea island women. Skilton notes in her book “Tempest” that Wragge chose names like Elina, describing them as “soft, dulcet names” that “bubbled off the tongue.” Eventually, Wragge grew bolder, naming storms after politicians who had slashed his weather bureau’s budget.

Wragge’s legacy inspired American novelist George Stewart when he wrote his 1941 novel “Storm,” which popularized naming storms by featuring a powerful storm, Maria, as its main character.

The approach quickly caught on among U.S. Army and Navy meteorologists during World War II. They informally began assigning female names — often those of their girlfriends or wives — to storms they tracked across the Pacific.

The push for an official system intensified in 1947 after a devastating hurricane slammed into Louisiana over Labor Day weekend. Just a year later, another powerhouse storm threatened to strike the same area at nearly the same time, leaving forecasters and newspapers at a loss for how to distinguish between the two.

Calls for a better naming system reached a fever pitch in 1950, when three hurricanes simultaneously churned through the Atlantic. To avoid chaos, the U.S. Weather Bureau adopted the Army-Navy phonetic alphabet, beginning with Tropical Storm Fox — the sixth storm of that busy season — and sowed the seeds of the structured naming system we rely on today.

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timeline showing retired hurricane names in atlantic before 1978 were all female names.

Hurricane names were all female before 1978

Retired names of hurricanes and tropical storms in the Atlantic basin from 1954 to 1980.

1950s

1960s

1970s

In 1953, the U.S. Weather Bureau formalized this female naming approach to hurricanes. Male names were added to the rotation in 1979.

“A major push to change the names got tied up with larger cultural shifts related to the feminist movement, as well as a discussion of sexism,” Skilton said.

Perhaps more intriguing is how the gender of a hurricane’s name affects public perception. A 2014 study found that hurricanes with feminine names resulted in higher mortality rates, not because the storms themselves were inherently more dangerous, but because people perceived storms with female names as less threatening and took fewer precautions. The researchers estimated that changing a severe storm’s name from Charley to Eloise could nearly triple its predicted death toll.

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The subjective art of storm naming

Every year the WMO holds a meeting to determine whether any hurricane names will be retired. This year the names Beryl, Helene and Milton were removed from the Atlantic basin. Storms with those names caused almost 300 deaths combined and over $100 billion in damage during 2024.

Typically, but not always, the names of very deadly storms are retired. Brian McNoldy, an atmospheric science research associate at the University of Miami, explains:

“It’s very subjective. Gordon in 1994 killed 1,152 people … That name is still in use. It’s by far the deadliest of any non-retired name … If someone doesn’t nominate it to be retired, then it won’t be.”

While some names will never be given to storms again, and some probably will never be storms at all — sorry Mortimer (too long) and Nixon (too controversial) — others stick around year after year. The first storm of the 2025 season will be called Andrea, the same as three previous hurricanes.

About this story

This story uses three datasets. We started with the WMO hurricane name lists from the Atlantic, Central North Pacific and Eastern North Pacific basins, collecting both current and retired names. For each one, we looked at when it was used, whether it had been retired, and if so, how many people it killed and how much damage it caused.

Next, we processed baby name data from the Social Security Administration for the years 2000 through 2023. We added features such as name length, first and last letter, and syllable count. The syllables were estimated using the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.

The third dataset came from “A Brief History of Human Time” (Laouenan, Morgane; Bhargava, Palaash; Eymeoud, Jean-Benoît; Gergaud, Olivier; Plique, Guillaume; Wasmer, Etienne, 2022), a cross-verified dataset of roughly 2.2 million notable individuals. We filtered the data to include only individuals born after 1900 with English-language Wikipedia pages. We focused on those whose occupational categories were listed as either “Leadership” or “Culture-core.” And we kept only people whose Wikipedia readership between 2015 and 2018 was in the top one percent of the dataset to define as notable.

Editing by Emily M. Eng and Bonnie Berkowitz. Copy editing by Briana Ellison.