Baby Names Popularity

Welcome to Baby Names Popularity—the premier online resource for exploring historical baby name trends in the United States from 1880 through 2022. Whether you’re an expecting parent searching for the perfect name, a genealogist tracing family history, or a name enthusiast fascinated by evolving naming fashions, our interactive charts reveal rises and falls in popularity for thousands of names. Discover timeless classics and modern innovations, compare multiple names at once, and gain unique insights into cultural shifts reflected in American naming practices.

How to Use This Site

Simply enter one or more first names (separated by commas) into the search box above and click “Search.” Our server pulls counts from the U.S. Social Security Administration’s public dataset, groups by year, and renders an overlaid trend chart. You can compare up to 20 names at once, zoom in on decades of interest, and hover over each point for exact counts.

About the Data

All data is sourced from the Social Security Administration baby names database. Each record shows the total number of babies registered with a given name in a calendar year. Counts include all genders combined, and names with fewer than 5 occurrences in a year are omitted by the SSA for privacy.

Limitations

Coverage: Only U.S. births reported to the SSA are included—names from other countries or unreported births aren’t in this dataset.
Privacy filtering: Years in which fewer than 5 babies received a name won’t display, so very rare names may appear to “dip to zero.”
Data lag: The SSA releases data with an annual delay—2023+ trends aren’t yet available here.
Static snapshots: This site shows raw counts, not normalized per-million births; for proportional popularity, divide counts by total births in that year.