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If you look at Laura Wattenberg's Baby Name Wizard blog this week, she's actually done a feature on exactly this, with cool graphs and everything! Basically, she says that Hillary and Hilary were pretty much head-to-head in the 80s. When Bill Clinton hit the campaign trail in '92, the name Hillary got a short-lived boost and the single 'l' spelling plummeted. Throughout the Clinton years, both spellings of the name decreased but the 'll' spelling remained much more common. Her theory is that Hillary Clinton "took ownership" of the name as the only famous Hil(l)ary of the time. The 'll' spelling was the one constantly seen in the media and became seen as the 'normal' one. This is all in the US, of course.