About this site

This site charts the popularity of 24,363 American first names, year by year, from 1880 through 2025.

Data source

All figures come from the U.S. Social Security Administration's national baby-name file, built from Social Security card applications. For privacy, the SSA excludes name–sex combinations with fewer than five babies in a year, so a name showing zero may have had up to four. Coverage before the 1930s is thinner, since Social Security numbers only became universal for newborns later; early-year counts undercount actual births.

How the numbers are computed

Popularity is births per 1,000 recorded babies of that sex in that year — the honest way to compare across eras with very different birth totals. Rank is the name's position among all names of that sex in that year, taken directly from the SSA ordering. Names spelled differently are counted separately (Sophia and Sofia are two names), exactly as in the official data. We publish a page for every name with at least 300 recorded babies all-time.

Famous people

The "famous people" lists come from the Pantheon project (MIT Media Lab / Datawheel), which ranks globally notable individuals by their presence across Wikipedia language editions. Data licensed under CC BY 4.0; people are matched to name pages by first name.

Updates

The SSA releases each year's data the following May. This site rebuilds automatically when a new release appears. Current snapshot: through 2025, generated 2026-09-01.

Author

Built by Oscar Leo, who writes about data and visualization. Found something odd, or want a feature? Reach out.