What's in a name? Hurricane Hilary is not named for who you think

Admit it, your first thought on Hurricane Hilary barreling toward the U.S. is that it is named for that Hillary.

It wasn’t.

Besides, if former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton took aim anywhere, it’s more likely to be Florida or Pennsylvania than California.

So how did Hurricane Hilary — or any hurricane for that matter — get its name?

According to the National Hurricane Center, tropical storms are named to help avoid confusion when multiple storms are in progress at the same time.

For hundreds of years, hurricanes took their names for the saints linked to the date the storm made landfall.

That led to confusing outcomes such as Hurricane San Felipe that hit Puerto Rico on Sept. 13, 1876, and another Hurricane San Felipe that hit the same island on Sept. 13, 1928.

In the 1950s, the U.S. adopted an international system that named storms after women and followed an alphabetical progression as the number of storms grew each season.

Hurricane Hilary updates: Southern California faces 'potentially catastrophic situation'

By the late 1970s, the U.S. adopted gender equality on storms, allowing male names to be linked to dreaded storms as well.

Arizonans may be taking hurricane protocols more seriously for the first time in a lifetime, as Hurricane Hilary churns up the Pacific Ocean toward the California coast.

Unlike other tropical storms that dissipate by the time they reach the southwestern U.S., Hilary is expected to maintain much of its power and is the first tropical storm watch in western U.S. history.

Beginning this weekend, the storm could dump years’ worth of rain in the Arizona desert in a matter of days, making Hilary a name to remember.

So who picks the names?

It is done according to rules set up by the World Meteorological Organization, an agency of the United Nations that includes 187 countries and six territories.

Six years’ worth of names were assigned decades ago and rotated since. In 2011, for example, Hurricane Hilary struck the coast of Mexico. That event caused no fatalities and only minimal damage, leaving it largely forgotten.

Hilary could come into use again in the eastern north Pacific Ocean in 2029.

Names remain on the list unless they become associated with devastating storms. There are, mercifully, no plans for another storm named “Katrina.”

There are 96 retired names, beginning with “Carol,” a 1954 storm that struck the Bahamas before crashing into North Carolina and running up the Eastern seaboard. In all, it left 72 people dead.

The most recent retiree is “Ian,” the name of a 2022 hurricane that killed 161 people, mostly in Florida.

Other names in this year’s rotation include “Franklin” in the Atlantic region and “Fernanda” in the eastern Pacific.

There’s a separate list for storms in the central north Pacific Ocean that could strike Hawaii. Those names are more in line with Hawaiian conventions, such as “Akoni” and “Moke.”

For what it’s worth, this year’s roster of storms in the Atlantic Ocean included Hurricane Don, which formed northeast of Bermuda on July 14 and fizzled out without great consequence over the ocean 10 days later.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Hurricane Hilary is not named for Hillary Clinton. How it got its name