There's a reason hurricanes and tropical storms aren't named willy-nilly any longer. Or Willy Nilly, for that matter.
"[N]ames are presumed to be far easier to remember than numbers and technical terms," the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) website says. "Many agree that appending names to storms makes it easier for the media to report on tropical cyclones, heightens interest in warnings and increases community preparedness." Basically, people in the path of the storms will remember and pay attention to media reports about Hurricane Bertha than they would Hurricane Two.
And so the names come, in alphabetical order, off a set of six lists that the WMO maintains. The six lists rotate. So the names used in 2020 — Arthur, Bertha, Cristobal, etc., for example — will come around again in 2026. (This is true for hurricanes in the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and the North Atlantic. The lists differ in other parts of the world.)
For the record, only 21 names are on each list in the Atlantic/Gulf of Mexico/Caribbean region. Don't look for names beginning with Q, U, X, Y or Z (sorry, Zelda). And if the storms start really piling on during the Atlantic hurricane season and forecasters need more than the 21 names in the same season, they turn to the Greek alphabet (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon and hello Zeta).
Before 1979, the storms were only named after women, but men names came into the mix in the 1970s. In 1978, men's names came to use for Northern Pacific storms. By 1979, they were also adopted for the Atlantic basin. Since then, the list has alternated between male and female names.