Spelling Variants Hide How Popular a Name Really Is

The single biggest distortion in published baby name rankings is that they count spellings rather than names. A name written five ways appears five times, each entry ranked on a fraction of its real total.

What grouping by sound does

This site groups spellings that share a pronunciation, using the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary and, for names outside it, a neural grapheme-to-phoneme model. Mary absorbs Merry, Merrie and Marry. Catherine absorbs Katherine, Kathryn and Catharine.

The effect is not cosmetic. Names with many accepted spellings move up substantially, and names with only one way to write them do not move at all — which means the ordering between them changes, not just their absolute numbers.

Which names are most affected

Two groups gain the most:

• Names with an unstable vowel. If a vowel can plausibly be written more than one way, it usually is, and the births scatter.
• Names that entered English recently. Long-established names have settled on a spelling by convention. Newer ones have not, so their births spread across whatever spellings parents reach for.

When you want the ungrouped view

Grouping is the right default for “how common is this name”, but not for every question. If what you care about is how often a child will have to spell their name out loud, the number that matters is the share of the group using their spelling — a name that is common overall but whose spelling is one of six will still be corrected constantly.

Each name page lists the variants that were folded in, so both readings are available.

The limits

Pronunciation-based grouping inherits the dictionary’s assumptions. Names pronounced differently by different families may be grouped when they should not be, or separated when they should not be. A curated override list handles the cases where the automatic grouping is known to be wrong, and the methodology page describes how it works.