Why Hurricanes Are Named:The 200-Year Story Behind Storm Names

Hurricane names sound modern, but the practice is older than the National Weather Service, older than the United States itself in some forms, and rooted in a habit that goes back to the Caribbean’s first inhabitants. The Carib and Mayan peoples had a word for the storms that came every summer, and the Spanish carried that word back to Europe with the slight bend in spelling that gave English its hurricane. Centuries later, the question of what to call each individual storm took longer to settle. The answer that finally stuck (alphabetical, alternating male and female, six lists in rotation) is the result of a slow process that ran from monks in Cuba to a 1941 novel to wartime Pacific airmen to a women’s-rights complaint in the 1970s. Here is how hurricane names became what they are today, and what it takes to get a name retired.

Why Hurricanes Are Named at All

The case for naming storms is communication. A hurricane that lasts a week can travel from the African coast to Texas, and during that week it will appear in dozens of forecasts, advisories, evacuation orders, news bulletins, and ship reports. A short name, distinct from any other active storm, is easier to track than a coordinate set, easier to broadcast over a scratchy radio, and easier for a coastal town to remember when the order to evacuate comes through. That basic logic has driven every iteration of the naming system, from saint days in 1825 to the current WMO rotation.

The earlier alternatives all proved inadequate. Latitude and longitude, used by ships at sea in the 1800s, produced numbers so easy to confuse that a single storm sometimes ended up reported under two or three different coordinate sets. The post-WWII U.S. system used the phonetic alphabet (Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog) and worked until 1953, when a new international phonetic alphabet was introduced and the names changed mid-system. By the time the National Weather Service tried alphabetical women’s names in 1953, the agency was looking for something with permanence: a simple list that would not need to be re-explained every season.

The First Names: Spanish Saints in Cuba and Puerto Rico

The earliest documented practice of giving individual hurricanes proper names belongs to Spanish-Catholic Cuba and Puerto Rico in the early 1800s. When a hurricane struck on a saint’s feast day, it took the saint’s name. Hurricane Santa Ana, for example, hit Puerto Rico on July 26, 1825, the feast of Saint Anne. When two storms hit on the same saint day in different years, they were tagged in order: Hurricane San Felipe (the First) struck Puerto Rico on September 13, 1876, and Hurricane San Felipe (the Second) struck the same island on the same date in 1928.

The saint-day system was a useful local solution. It gave the storm a memorable name immediately, anchored to the date, and the date itself often carried meaning for the parish. The system did not survive the move to professional meteorology because the calendar was uneven (some days had no saint, some had several), and the names did not generalize to storms in other religious traditions or open-ocean storms that never made landfall.

George Stewart’s Novel and the Wartime Pacific

The first time hurricanes got proper names in a system that meteorologists themselves used came from an unexpected source: a 1941 novel. American writer George R. Stewart’s book Storm follows a Pacific storm system named Maria from formation to dissipation, and meteorologists in the U.S. Army Air Forces and the U.S. Navy, who plotted Pacific storms during WWII, took the idea seriously. By 1945, military forecasters were giving Pacific storms women’s names informally. The custom traveled with the meteorologists who had used it during the war.

That informal custom is how the U.S. naming convention crossed from military to civilian use. The wartime forecasters who pushed it had seen, in real conditions, that a memorable name reduced confusion in a way coordinate sets never could. When the National Weather Service formalized the system in 1953, they were borrowing a habit that already worked in the Pacific.

The Switch to Women’s Names in 1953

1953 is the year hurricane names became official in the Atlantic basin. The National Weather Service rolled out an alphabetical list of women’s names, used in order: the season’s first hurricane got an A name, the second a B name, and so on. The choice of women’s names was a direct echo of the wartime Pacific custom, plus the older sailor tradition of giving ships female names. The rule was simple: alphabetical, female, never a Q or U or X-Y-Z (too few names start with those letters), and famous storms got their names retired so they would not be reused.

The 25-year stretch from 1953 to 1978 produced some of the most-remembered storms in the post-war U.S. record under women’s names. Carol and Hazel hit New England in 1954. Janet flattened parts of the Caribbean in 1955. Camille struck Mississippi in 1969 with sustained winds estimated at 175 mph and a 24-foot storm surge. Agnes flooded the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast in 1972. The all-female list ran through that whole period, retiring the worst names and recycling the rest every few years.

1979: Men Join the List

The shift to alternating male and female names came out of the women’s-rights pushback of the 1970s. The argument, made loudly through the decade, was that the convention of giving destructive forces of nature women’s names was dated and unfair. The complaint reached the National Weather Service in the late 1970s. In 1978, the Pacific storm list was changed to alternate male and female names. In 1979, the Atlantic list followed.

The 1979 Atlantic list is the year Bob, David, Frederic, Henri, and Larry first appeared as official storm names. The pattern held: alphabetical order, alternating gender, 21 names per season, no Q or U or X-Y-Z. That structure is still in use today, almost half a century later, because it has proved both memorable and culturally durable.

How the Six-List Rotation Works Today

Storm names today are managed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), an arm of the United Nations. The WMO maintains six rotating lists of Atlantic Basin names, one per year, on a six-year cycle. The 2026 list is the same one used in 2020, with retirements substituted in. The 2027 list is the same one used in 2021. The cycle continues until a name on a given list gets retired, at which point the WMO Hurricane Committee picks a replacement at its annual spring meeting.

• 21 names per list: A through W, skipping Q, U, X, Y, Z. The 2025 list ran Andrea through Wendy.
• Alternating male and female: alphabetical and alternating, set decades in advance.
• Six-year recycling: after the 2026 season, that list returns in 2032.
• Auxiliary list for over-21 seasons: if a season uses all 21 names, the WMO turns to a supplementary list of 21 additional names, adopted in 2021 to replace the Greek alphabet system.

For the full year-by-year list of upcoming names through 2029, see our hurricane names reference page, updated each March after the WMO annual meeting.

Why a Name Gets Retired

A name comes off the list when a storm using it does enough damage or kills enough people that reusing the name would be (in the WMO’s language) “insensitive” to the affected communities. The decision is made at the WMO Hurricane Committee’s annual spring meeting, usually in March, based on submissions from the affected nations. The committee picks a replacement name beginning with the same letter, and the new name slots into the list in the same alphabetical position.

The retirement record is heavy with letters near the start of the alphabet. As of 2026, names beginning with I are the most-retired in Atlantic history (Ian 2022, Ida 2021, Irma 2017, Ike 2008, Ivan 2004, Isabel 2003, Igor 2010, Irene 2011, and several earlier). The pattern reflects when in the season the most intense storms tend to form: late August and September, which line up with the I, J, K, L names. Names beginning with letters past the middle of the alphabet are retired far less often because, in any given year, fewer storms reach that far.

The 2025 Retirement: Hurricane Melissa

The most recent name to be retired from the Atlantic list is Melissa, struck off the rotation by the WMO Hurricane Committee in March 2026. Hurricane Melissa formed in the central Caribbean in late October 2025 and intensified into a Category 5, becoming the strongest hurricane on record to make landfall in Jamaica with sustained winds near 190 mph. The storm killed more than 90 people across Jamaica and Haiti, displaced tens of thousands, and produced an estimated several billion dollars in damage. The Hurricane Committee chose Molly as the replacement, set to first appear on the 2031 list (the same list as 2025, with Melissa replaced).

Before Melissa, the most recent Atlantic retirements included Fiona and Ian (both 2022), Ida (2021), Laura (2020), and Dorian (2019). Each replacement name is chosen to fit the same letter and to feel similar in tone and origin to the rest of the list, so the alternating-gender pattern stays intact and the regional flavor (predominantly English, Spanish, and French names) remains consistent across the basin.

Goodbye to the Greek Alphabet

For decades, the WMO turned to the Greek alphabet (Alpha, Beta, Gamma) when a season ran past 21 names. That happened twice: in 2005 (Hurricane Wilma was the W, then six Greek names through Zeta) and in 2020 (the most active Atlantic season on record at 30 named storms, running all the way to Iota). The 2020 season exposed problems with the Greek system that the WMO had been hearing for years. The names looked alike on paper (Eta, Theta, and Zeta tripped both broadcasters and Spanish-language translators). Some of the Greek-named storms did enough damage to qualify for retirement (Eta and Iota in 2020, both reaching Category 4), but the WMO was reluctant to retire a Greek letter from the supplementary alphabet itself.

In March 2021, the WMO Hurricane Committee dropped the Greek alphabet for good. The replacement is a supplementary 21-name list of regular human names (Adria, Braylen, Caridad, Deshawn, and so on) that the WMO will turn to if a season runs past Wendy or whatever closes the main list. The Greek-named storms of 2020 were considered “retired” in the sense that the names will not be reused for storms, but the Greek letters themselves remain in the alphabet.

How a Storm Earns Its Name in Real Time

The naming threshold is sustained wind speed: 39 mph. When the National Hurricane Center in Miami determines that a tropical depression has developed sustained winds at or above 39 mph (cyclonic, organized circulation, warm core), the system is upgraded to a tropical storm and given the next available name from that year’s list. The name stays with the storm for the rest of its life, including any later upgrade to hurricane strength at 74 mph or to major-hurricane status (Category 3 and up) at 111 mph.

Across the Atlantic basin, the season runs June 1 through November 30, with peak activity from mid-August to late October. The most active named period of any year is the second week of September, on average. The first storm of any Atlantic season takes the A name (Andrea in 2025, Arthur in 2026), regardless of when in June, July, or August it forms. If no storm forms in June, the A name simply waits.

Other Name Lists Worth Knowing

The Atlantic system gets the most U.S. attention, but five other tropical-cyclone basins each maintain their own naming systems, run by regional WMO committees. The Eastern North Pacific uses six rotating lists similar to the Atlantic. The Central North Pacific uses four rotating lists of Hawaiian-origin names. The Western North Pacific (the most active basin in the world) uses a 140-name list contributed by the 14 member nations affected, including Japan, the Philippines, China, and Korea. The North Indian Ocean and Australian regions each use their own lists. The naming convention is the same: short, distinct, easy to broadcast.

For coastal residents, the name is most useful as a tracking handle. Whatever a storm gets called, the practical question (when do I prepare, when do I evacuate) is answered by the forecast, not the name. The Farmers’ Almanac long-range forecast covers Atlantic hurricane season as one of its tracked seasonal patterns. For storm-by-storm prep, the National Hurricane Center is the authoritative source. For the bigger pre-season prep questions, see our hurricane safety tips piece.

A storm with a name is a storm being tracked. The name is a forecasting and broadcast convenience, not a description of the storm. The forecast is the part to watch. For a complete A-through-W list of upcoming Atlantic names through 2030, including who picked them and when each list comes back into rotation, see our complete tropical-cyclone naming reference at the National Hurricane Center.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who picks hurricane names today?

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Hurricane Committee picks Atlantic and Eastern Pacific names. The committee meets every spring and decides on retirements and replacements. The National Hurricane Center in Miami is the one that actually assigns the next name on the list to a forming storm in real time.

Why do hurricanes have human names instead of numbers?

A short, distinct name is easier to broadcast, remember, and track than a coordinate set or sequence number. The numbering system was tried in the 1800s (latitude and longitude) and the 1900s (storm-of-the-year sequence), and both produced confusion when more than one storm was active.

What name was retired from the 2025 hurricane season?

Melissa. The WMO Hurricane Committee struck the name from the rotating list in March 2026 after the Category 5 storm caused more than 90 deaths in Jamaica and Haiti in October 2025. The replacement on the 2031 list is Molly.

When does a tropical storm get its name?

When sustained winds reach 39 mph and the system has organized cyclonic circulation. The name stays with the storm for its entire life, including any later upgrade to hurricane strength at 74 mph.

Why are no hurricane names assigned to Q, U, X, Y, or Z?

Too few common names start with those letters. The WMO settled on 21 letters (A through W, minus Q and U) as the practical compromise that produces enough name variety without forcing odd or unfamiliar choices.

What happened to the Greek alphabet names?

Dropped in March 2021. The Greek system caused translation problems (Eta, Theta, Zeta sounded too alike) and presented difficulty when a Greek-named storm caused enough damage to qualify for retirement. The WMO replaced the Greek list with a supplementary list of 21 regular names (Adria, Braylen, Caridad, Deshawn, and so on) that comes into use only when a season exceeds 21 names.

When did men’s names start being used for hurricanes?

Pacific storms switched to alternating male and female names in 1978. Atlantic storms followed in 1979. The change came out of the women’s-rights pushback of the 1970s, which argued that giving destructive natural forces only women’s names was dated and unfair.

Where can I see the full list of upcoming hurricane names?

The Farmers’ Almanac maintains a year-by-year list updated each March after the WMO meeting; see hurricane names by year. The official source is the National Hurricane Center’s tropical-cyclone names reference.