About

What this is

Most baby name sites will tell you a name means “brave warrior” and leave it there. Etymology is genuinely interesting, but it is also unverifiable for a lot of names and it is not what most parents are actually trying to find out. The questions people ask are more practical: how many other children will have this name, is it going up or down, how else do people spell it, what will it get shortened to.

Those questions have answers in the public record, so that is what this site is built on.

Where the data comes from

The US Social Security Administration publishes annual counts of names given to children born in the United States, going back to 1880 and updated each May. It includes any name given to at least five children of one sex in a year. That threshold matters: names given to fewer than five children in a year simply do not appear, so the data is a near-complete record of common naming and an incomplete record of rare naming.

Territory files for Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and others are included alongside the national data.

What is done to it

The main piece of work is grouping spellings that sound the same, so that a name split across five spellings is counted once rather than five times. That grouping uses the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, with a neural grapheme-to-phoneme model for names the dictionary does not cover, and a curated override list for cases where the automatic result is wrong.

The full process, including what is excluded and why, is on the methodology page.

What this site is not

• Not affiliated with the SSA. It uses their public data; they have no involvement in this site.
• Not a source of name meanings. Where a name has a documented association — biblical, for instance — that is stated. Speculative etymology is not.
• Not global. This is US data. A name’s popularity elsewhere may look nothing like what is shown here.

Corrections

The grouping is automated and it gets things wrong sometimes — two names merged that should be separate, or the reverse. If you find one, the contact page explains how to report it. Corrections go into the override list and are applied on the next data regeneration.