Isn’t Dorian kind of an unusual name for a storm?

You don’t meet a Dorian every day. Fewer than three out of every 10,000 babies born in the United States last year were given that name, according to the Social Security Administration.

The title character of Oscar Wilde’s novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” was no one you’d be likely to name a child after, and only a tiny handful of Dorians have achieved any fame as singers, actors or athletes. However, Dorian was the surname of Zach Braff’s character on “Scrubs.”

So how did the name get attached to a major hurricane?

Tropical storm and hurricane names come from annual alphabetical lists drawn up by the World Meteorological Organization. There are six such lists in rotation, so names recur every six years. But when a storm proves to be especially notorious, damaging and deadly, that name is retired — there won’t be another Katrina, Harvey, Maria or Sandy — and is replaced with another beginning with the same letter. That has happened 74 times since World War II.

Most of the names used for Atlantic storms are familiar ones to American ears, but a few relative rarities have come to be sprinkled in the lists as substitutes for retired names. The I’s have had especially high turnover — Ione, Inez, Iris, Isabel, Ivan, Ike, Igor, Irene, Ingrid and Irma have all been scratched — so the six “I” names currently in rotation include Idalia and Isaias as well as the more often encountered Isaac, Ida, Ian and Imelda.

Dorian is the first relatively uncommon “D” name to join the lists. It was chosen after the 2007 season to replace Dean, the name of a Category 5 storm that blasted through the Caribbean and Central America that year, leading to some 45 deaths.

There was a Tropical Storm Dorian in 2013, but it did minimal damage and was not blamed for any deaths. So the hurricane bearing down on Florida in 2019 is Dorian the second — and if it proves disastrous, perhaps the last. — Patrick Lyons

Reporting was contributed by Patricia Mazzei, Frances Robles, Joseph B. Treaster and Nick Madigan in Miami; Elisabeth Malkin in Mexico City; Chris Dixon in Charleston, S.C.; and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Amy Harmon and Patrick Lyons in New York.