Meaning and history
Latin form of Esther. Like Esther, it has been used in England since the Protestant Reformation, and Nathaniel Hawthorne used it for the heroine of his 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne, a Puritan woman forced to wear a red letter A on her chest after giving birth to a child out of wedlock.
20062006: no US SSA record for this spelling
2007: no US SSA record for this spelling
2008: no US SSA record for this spelling
2009: 5 births, rank #17,294
2010: 5 births, rank #16,992
20112011: no US SSA record for this spelling
2012: no US SSA record for this spelling
2013: no US SSA record for this spelling
2014: no US SSA record for this spelling
2015: no US SSA record for this spelling
20162016: no US SSA record for this spelling
2017: no US SSA record for this spelling
2018: no US SSA record for this spelling
2019: 7 births, rank #12,448
2020: no US SSA record for this spelling
20212021: no US SSA record for this spelling
2022: no US SSA record for this spelling
2023: 5 births, rank #15,194
2024: no US SSA record for this spelling
20252025: 5 births, rank #14,942
Hester moved from #873 to #886 for girls between 1949 and 1950. Its highest annual birth count came in 1918, with 394 births.