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.

The top 5, then and now

All-time totals are dominated by names that were huge for a century. What's popular today looks nothing like it.

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

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 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.