Is Hurricane Lee a boy or girl name?

Lee could be either, but in this case it’s a boy. That’s because the names on the list alternate between male and female.

We don’t refer to a hurricane as he or she because they aren’t alive. Pretending that they are, even saying something like “he” is making landfall, gives off the idea that these storms have a mind of their own. But they don’t. They follow science.

How did we start naming storms in the first place? It began in 1950. They used the old phonetic alphabet, which changed two years later.

In 1954, they decided to create a list of all female names. That practice continued in the Atlantic until 1979, when they created what we know today -- six lists with male and female names that get rotated every year. 

The names are decided on by an international committee known as the World Meteorological Organization.

Names make it easier to track storms than numbers. A name can be retired if it's a bad storm and will never be used again.

Just because a storm is given a human name, their purpose is only to balance out energy. That’s why we refer to storms like Lee as “it”.