What We Name Our Babies

01 · Any name

Look up a name

Babies given the name per 1,000 babies of the same sex, by year

Type a name and pick it from the list, or press Enter. Hover or touch the chart to read a year.

SSA leaves out a name in any year fewer than 5 babies of one sex got it, so rare names drop to zero in those years. Names with fewer than 100 babies in all aren't included.

02 · Overnight sensations

Sudden spikes, and what happened next

The 20 sharpest one-year jumps in a name’s popularity, from 5 years before to 15 after. Each line is a share of the name’s peak (the gray line is 100%).

Hover or touch a panel to read a year. The dot marks ten years after the peak.

• Stuck
• Faded
• Too soon to tell

Most spikes don’t last. Of the 20 sharpest one-year jumps, 19 happened at least 10 years ago, and 13 of those had faded to under half their peak popularity a decade later. The sharpest: Kizzy went from fewer than 5 girls in 1976 to 1,117 in 1977, and 10 years later it was given at 1% of that rate. Aaliyah held on best: in 2007 it was 2.1 times as popular as in 1997.

A jump is the rise in a name’s share of same-sex births from one year to the next, counting a suppressed previous year as 5 babies. Only jumps to at least 1,000 babies count, one per name. “Stuck” means that 10 years after its peak (the jump year or up to 3 years later) the name was at least 50% as popular; “too soon” means that hasn’t happened yet. The likely triggers in the table are editorial notes, not part of the SSA data.

03 · Crossing over

Names that changed sides

Each bar runs from the last year a name was mostly given to one sex (over 70%) to the first year it was mostly given to the other. The dot is the year it crossed 50%.

Hover or touch a dot to read a name’s flip.

• Became a girls’ name
• Became a boys’ name

Names mostly move from boys to girls: of the 21 names that flipped with real numbers on both sides, 17 went from boys to girls and 4 from girls to boys. A typical flip took 15 years to go from mostly one to mostly the other; Jaime took 2 years (1973–1975). Of the 14 boys-to-girls names still given widely in 2025, 12 are still majority girls.

Shares are 5-year averages, judged only in years a name averaged at least 100 babies. A flip counts only with at least 10,000 babies of the old sex before the crossing and of the new sex after it, which leaves out names like Ashley, given to only a few thousand boys before it became a girls’ name. Jaime flipped twice: to girls in the mid-1970s, then back to boys.

04 · The long tail

Are names getting more diverse?

Share of babies given one of that year’s 10 or 100 most popular names, by decade

Hover or touch a point to read its value.

• Girls
• Boys

Yes. In the 1880s, 41% of boys got one of that year’s 10 most popular names; in the 2020s so far it’s 8%. For girls the top 10 peaked at 25% in the 1940s and is now 7%. Even the top 100 now covers only 39% of boys and 32% of girls, down from 79% and 74% in the 1880s.

*2020–2025 only. Each year’s top names are that year’s own. Early decades are less complete: many people born before 1937, when Social Security began, never applied for a card. Different names a year (in the table) counts only names given to at least 5 babies, so it also grows with the number of births.

05 · Sound and shape

How long, and how it ends

The average length of babies’ names, and the share of babies whose name ends in each letter, by year

Hover or touch a line or cell to read a year. Darker cells are more common endings.

• Girls
• Boys

Boys’ names ending in “-n” went from 15% of boys in the 1880s to 28% in 2025 (peaking at 36% in 2011), while “-s” fell from 15% to 9%. For girls the big change is the fall of “-e”, from 37% to 18%; “-a” is now the most common ending, at 38%. Names got longer, then shorter again: the average girl’s name peaked at 6.4 letters in 1989 and the average boy’s at 6.0 in 1989, up from 5.4 and 5.6 in 1880; in 2025 they were 5.9 and 5.7.

Weighted by babies: a name given to 10,000 babies counts 10,000 times. Heatmaps show letters that ended at least 1% of one sex’s names in some year.

06 · Where

Where a name is most popular

Babies given the name per 1,000 babies of the same sex born in each state

Search a name, pick a year, and hover over or tap a state.

State data starts in 1910 and covers names with at least 1,000 babies nationally. SSA leaves out a name in any state and year with fewer than 5 babies (gray). That can leave out over half of a small state’s babies, so each state’s births are estimated from its babies with that year’s 100 most popular names nationally (accurate to roughly 15%). Rankings use only states with at least 20 babies given the name and an estimated 1,000 babies of that sex. Colors are scaled to each year’s most popular state, so compare states within a year; for change over time, see the first chart.