The data, and its limits

Everything on this site is computed from one public source. Nothing is written by hand, and nothing is guessed.

The source

The US Social Security Administration publishes, for every year of birth from 1880 to 2024, how many babies of each sex were given each name. The files used here were tabulated on 2 March 2025 and contain 104,819 different names. As a work of the US federal government they are in the public domain. NameYears is not affiliated with the SSA.

What the numbers leave out

Rare names. To protect privacy the SSA withholds any name given to fewer than five babies of one sex in a year. A name “absent” from a year may have had one to four births.

Early decades. The counts cover people who have a Social Security number. Many people born before 1937 never applied for one, so those years are under-counted. Ranks and shares are a better guide than raw counts for that period.

Spelling. Each spelling is a separate name: Catherine, Katherine and Kathryn are three lines, not one. Name pages list other spellings found by a simple letter rule, not by judgement.

The United States only. A name rare here may be common elsewhere.

Why there are no meanings

The data says nothing about what a name means or where it comes from. Etymologies on name sites are often copied from one another and hard to verify, so we publish none. If that changes, every meaning will carry its source.

How things are computed

Rank — position within sex and year by number of births, ties alphabetically, exactly as the SSA defines it; shown down to 1,000.

Share — a name’s births divided by all recorded births of that sex that year. Because withheld rare names are missing from the total, the true share is very slightly lower.

Trend labels — at its peak: the record year is within the last four years of data. Comeback: a peak at least fifty years ago, a fall to 35% of that share or less, and a current share at least 2.5 times the low point and still rising. Rising / falling: the share is at least 1.5 times, or at most 0.6 times, what it was ten years ago. Faded: 5% of the peak share or less. Otherwise steady.

Names that rose and fell together — the same sex, ranked by cosine similarity of their share curves averaged over five-year spans: the shape of the line, regardless of size.

Used for both sexes — the less common sex has at least 15% of all births of the name.

Which names have pages

11,712 of the 104,819 in the source: every name with at least 1,000 recorded births since 1880, plus any name that was ever in a year’s top 50. Below that, a curve is mostly gaps — the SSA withholds years with fewer than five births — and a page would have little to say.

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