What Sound-Grouping Reveals About America's #1 Baby Names
How combining sound-equivalent spellings changes the list of names that reached #1 in the US, and which names enter or fall off the top spot once spellings are summed.
NamePlay Blog
Data-driven explorations of baby names, trends, and linguistics.
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Native American Names
What names mark Native American communities? Three answers from the 2020 Census, plus the names where Native American bearers are most over-represented.
Asian / NHPI American Names
What names mark Asian and NHPI America? Three answers, ranked from the 2020 Census, plus the full list of names that are at least 90% Asian or NHPI.
Black American Names
What names mark Black America? Three answers, ranked from the 2020 Census, plus the full list of names that are at least 90% Black.
Hispanic American Names
What names mark Hispanic America? Three answers, ranked from the 2020 Census, plus the full list of names that are at least 90% Hispanic.
Multiracial American Names
What names mark Multiracial America? Three answers, ranked from the 2020 Census, and why the standard 'predominantly' framing breaks down at a 4% population slice.
White American Names
What names mark white America? Three answers, ranked from the 2020 Census, plus the full list of names that are at least 90% white.
Who Wears America's 25 Most Common First Names?
America's 25 most common first names belong overwhelmingly to one demographic, with two telling exceptions. Using the first-ever 2020 Census tabulation of first names by race and Hispanic origin, here is the racial composition of every bearer pool in the combined top 25, plus the male and female top 25s.
How 'eigh' Became Distinctively Feminine
Until 1954, most babies with 'eigh' in their name were boys. Then Leigh flipped, Ashleigh broke the pattern open, and 'eigh' became one of the most reliably feminine spellings in American naming.
America's Most Popular Extinct Baby Names
Sparkline charts tracing the rise and fall of the most popular U.S. baby names that have gone extinct: three or more years with zero recorded births through 2024.
America's 50 Most Popular Baby Names
Sparkline charts tracing the rise and fall of the 50 most popular baby names in the United States since 1880.
The Animated Unisex Name Map of America
Watch gender-neutral baby names spread across the United States in an animated map from 1930 to 2024, showing regional patterns and the rise and fall of unisex naming.
Where Unisex Names Are Most Popular
A state-by-state heatmap showing where gender-neutral baby names are most popular across the US, with controls for gender-balance threshold and pronunciation grouping.
Breaking Down the Most Popular Unisex Baby Names
How do the most popular unisex baby names split between boys and girls? Explore the breakdown across decades, with controls for time period, spelling grouping, and gender-balance threshold.
the most common unisex names in the U.S., by gender ratio
Not the most perfectly balanced names, but the names that surpass a certain threshold of popularity for both genders. The names you expect to see.
Perfectly Balanced: exploring the most gender-neutral names
What names are truly the most non-binary? Exploring the most ambiguous names from 1960 to today by comparing time periods.
Harmonious Couples: girls' and boys' names with similar arcs
Using data, we can find pairs of names with the most similar popularity trends in each decade.
We're Past Peak 'Tragedeigh'
Names containing 'eigh', and births with them, peaked in 2019 and have declined 17% and 31% respectively since then. Good news?
The Difference One Letter Makes: So close...
Efficiently finding all names that differ by a single letter in the SSA baby name dataset, and exploring which names are one letter off from the most other names.
Educating Name Meaning Guesses with Data
Does telling a large language model when and where a name has been used lead to better name origin guesses? Let's find out why and how.