Background Information

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.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.