Change in popularity
Popular names by State
Popular names by decade
Popular names of twins
Baby names & city names
Number of U. S. births based on
Social Security card applications
Beyond the top 1000 names
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History
In 1998, the Social Security Administration published
Actuarial
Note #139, Name Distributions in the Social Security Area, August 1997, on the
distribution of given names of Social Security number holders. The note,
written by actuary Michael W. Shackleford, gave birth to the present website.
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Data source
All names are from Social Security card applications for births that
occurred in the United States after 1879. Note that many people born
before 1937 never applied for a Social Security card, so their names
are not included in our data. For others who did apply, our records
may not show the place of birth, and again their names are not included
in our data.
All data are from a 100% sample of our records on Social Security card applications
as of the end of February 2009.
Data qualifications
People using our data on popular names are urged to explicitly acknowledge the following
qualifications.
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Names are restricted to cases where the year of birth, sex, State of birth (50 States
and District of Columbia) are on record, and where the given name is at least 2
characters long.
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With one exception, name data are not edited. For example, the sex associated with a name may be
incorrect. Entries such as "Unknown" and "Baby" are not removed from the lists. The only
exception to our non-edit policy is for names exceeding 10 characters in length. The data
file we use is limited to the first 10 characters, so that a popular name such as Christopher
lacks the terminal letter r. We fix obvious truncated names where possible.
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Different spellings of similar names are not combined. For example,
the names Caitlin, Caitlyn, Kaitlin, Kaitlyn, Kaitlynn, Katelyn,
and Katelynn are considered separate names and each has its own rank.
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When two different names are tied with the same frequency for a given year
of birth, we break the tie by assigning rank in alphabetical order.
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Some names are applied to both males and females (for example, Micah). Our rankings
are done by sex, so that a name such as Micah will have a different rank for males
as compared to females. When you seek the popularity of a specific name (see
"Popularity of a Name"), you can specify the sex.
If you do not specify the sex, we provide rankings for the more popular name-sex
combination.
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