Popular Baby Names

No need to buy a book to find out what the current popular names are. When babies are first born they are given a social security number. The Social Security Administration has all the names in their database of the names of those babies plus anyone else who has ever had a social security card. The information has been compiled in a searchable database. You can search the database by state, by year, by popularity, ranking, or by decade. It goes back all the way to the 1880s. The database does not yet include the names from 2009.

The top name for baby girls over the last 100 years is Emma (a name I'm very partial to) and Jacob is the top ranked name for boys. I was very surprised to see that the second most popular name for girls of the last 100 years was Isabella. I don't know very many Isabella's. Actually I don't think I know any Isabella's. For boys the second most popular name is Michael. I know a lot of Michaels. Emily is the third ranked for girls and the boy's third ranked name is Ethan (a nice strong name). Fourth ranked for girls is Madison and the boys name is Joshua. Number five for the girls is Ava and for the boys is Daniel.

I liked going through the database looking at the names. I would be a little leery of naming my son Alvin, too much rodent association. I probably wouldn't name a girl Skylar as we once had a parakeet by that name. Skylar was listed as a girl's name and dropped in popularity from a ranking in 2007 of 171 to 191 in 2008.

You can search the database by decade also. The least popular names for the 2000s for boys is Jax and for girls it was Finley. Sorry if anyone who reads this has those names. I'm just writing what I saw not making any judgments.

It was fun looking through the names. Some of the names remind you of songs, some names are flowers, and some names are places. Like the name London for a girl. We don't get to choose our names. We have to rely on the wisdom of our parents. I'm not wild about my name, but I'm named after other family members so it's not so bad.

The Social Security Administrations provides the top 1000 names in their database. They say they could provide more, but that any more would slow down their servers. So it looks like the further down in rank your name would be the less likely you would find it in on their site. If you do decide to go by and check out the names, tell them Pat sent you. Maybe I'll get a tax break for driving traffic to their site.

Source:

http://www.socialsecurity.gov/OACT/babynames/index.html

http://www.socialsecurity.gov/OACT/babynames/limits.html