After WWII the practice was developed by the US military in the western Pacific to avoid confusion when communicating with the public when more than one tropical cyclone existed at the same time. By the 1950s it was adopted in the Atlantic where names were originally taken from the WWII version of the Phonetic Alphabet. By 1953 the list of names to use were changed to women names which were created yearly to avoid confusion between years. Over the years, men's names were added and then regional names common to the populations around the different ocean basins where the cyclones formed.
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/storm-names.html