About this site
This site charts the popularity of every recorded American first name, year by year, from official Social Security data. No estimates, no scraping: a fresh snapshot of the full national file, rebuilt whenever the SSA publishes a new year.
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.
Name meanings
Name origins and meanings are drawn from Wiktionary, the free dictionary, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Etymology is an inexact science: where sources disagree, Wiktionary's summary is shown as-is.
Famous people
Candidates come from the Pantheon project (MIT Media Lab / Datawheel, CC BY 4.0), which catalogs globally notable individuals. For each name we rank them by English Wikipedia pageviews over the last 12 months, so the list reflects who people actually look up today. Portraits and descriptions come from Wikipedia.
Updates
The SSA releases each year's data the following May. This site rebuilds automatically when a new release appears, and the famous-people rankings are refreshed regularly. Current snapshot: through 2025, generated 2026-09-08.
Author
Built by Oscar Leo, who writes about data and visualization. Found something odd, or want a feature? Reach out.