US baby names, by the numbers

Every name given to an American baby since 1880, pulled from Social Security records. Here's what 375,362,447 births look like.

Why does the data start in 1880?

This is the part most people get wrong. These aren't birth certificates — they're Social Security card applications. Social Security didn't exist until 1936, so the oldest people in the data are simply the ones who were still alive to apply for a card when the program began. The SSA drew the line at births after 1879.

Which means 1880 isn't when records started. It's roughly the edge of living memory in 1936. It also means the earliest years are thin — plenty of people born before 1937 never applied for a card at all, so they're missing entirely.

Why some names look misspelled

Browse long enough and you'll hit Maryann, Obrien, or Christopherjame. Those aren't typos in this dataset — they're what the SSA actually recorded, and two rules explain nearly all of them.

Punctuation is stripped. Spaces, hyphens and apostrophes are removed before the name is stored. Of all 105,966 names here, exactly 0 contain any of the three. So Mary Ann is filed as Maryann (63,005 babies), O'Brien as Obrien, and Taylor-Grace as Taylorgrace. A hyphenated name doesn't survive the paperwork.

Names are cut off at 15 characters. 40 names sit at exactly that length, and the truncation is often visible mid-word: Christopherjame is Christopher James with the last letter shaved off.

The rest are genuine — whatever was written on the application is what got recorded, spelling included. That's why a name can appear five times in a century and never again.

How many names come from the Bible?

Every name here was checked against the full text of scripture. 1,836 of them turn up — but they don't all mean the same thing, so they're graded rather than lumped together. Claiming Sue is a biblical name because the verb "sue" appears once would undermine the ones that genuinely are.

68,629,170 American babies have been given the name of someone in the Bible since 1880 — one in 5 of every birth on record. Browse all of them →

The cross-reference comes from ScriptureWords, a companion project that indexes every word in the Bible — each one extracted, counted, categorised and linked to every verse it appears in. That categorisation is what makes the three tiers possible: it records whether a word shows up as a person, a place, or just a word, and whether scripture capitalises it. Every name page here links straight through to its verses.

How long is a name?

The shortest name in the whole dataset is 2 letters — the SSA won't accept a single character — and the longest is 15, because that's where it truncates. 6 letters is the most common by some way. The split is the interesting part: short names skew heavily male, long names heavily female, and they cross over around five.

• 2 155 108 boy · 47 girl
• 3 1,049 649 boy · 400 girl
• 4 5,879 3,138 boy · 2,741 girl
• 5 18,127 8,367 boy · 9,760 girl
• 6 29,716 12,181 boy · 17,535 girl
• 7 27,281 8,516 boy · 18,765 girl
• 8 14,931 3,996 boy · 10,935 girl
• 9 5,735 1,602 boy · 4,133 girl
• 10 1,873 679 boy · 1,194 girl
• 11 694 344 boy · 350 girl
• 12 258 151 boy · 107 girl
• 13 158 100 boy · 58 girl
• 14 70 37 boy · 33 girl
• 15 40 34 boy · 6 girl

The top 5 of every decade

Read it from the bottom up and you can watch taste turn over. Mary held the top spot for most of a century; nobody has replaced her for anything like as long.

Names that switched sex

Not "became more common for girls" — genuinely flipped. These were overwhelmingly boys' names before 1950 and are overwhelmingly girls' names today.

The longest reigns at number one

Mary was the most popular girls' name in America for 76 separate years. Nothing has come close since.

• Mary 76 yrs 1880–1961
• John 44 yrs 1880–1923
• Michael 44 yrs 1954–1998
• Robert 17 yrs 1924–1953
• Jennifer 15 yrs 1970–1984

Longest consecutive streaks

Total years and consecutive years are different questions, and the gap between them is where the good stories are. Mary was #1 in 76 separate years but only 67 in a row — Linda knocked her off in 1947. Michael's 44 years are really 6 and then 38, because David took 1960 from him and never came back.

Perfectly split down the middle

Names given to more than 50,000 babies where boys and girls are almost dead even. Browse all 3,590 unisex names →

When pop culture named a generation

Some names appear out of nowhere in a single year. You can usually name the exact reason.

And when the news ruins one

It works in reverse too. A name can be perfectly ordinary one year and unusable the next, and you can name that reason just as precisely.

Adolph is the slowest of these and the most complete. It was already drifting down from a 1917 peak of 673 babies when America entered the war; it never recovered, and the last American Adolph on record was born in 2023.

And names that fell off a cliff

53,227 of the names in this dataset — 50% of them — haven't been given to a single American baby since 2016.

Want a name nobody else has?

Names given to fewer than 5 babies in a year are withheld for privacy, so the truly rare ones are invisible by design. Everything above that line you can filter by exactly how common it is right now.