About Name Battle
Naming a baby is one of the first big decisions you make together — and one of the few where two people who agree on everything else can get completely stuck. Name Battle exists to unstick it.
Instead of another endless alphabetical list, you get small games that actually produce a decision: swipe a deck with your partner and see only the names you both liked, put two favorites in a head-to-head battle, run your shortlist through a bracket, or let the family vote from their phones. Every name in every game carries 145 years of real US data, so you are deciding with facts instead of a vague feeling that a name is “getting popular.”
Where the numbers come from
Every chart and ranking comes from the baby-names dataset published by the US Social Security Administration: every first name given to five or more babies since 1880, nationally and by state. Nothing is estimated, scraped or crowd-sourced. We refresh it each year when the SSA publishes the new list — so a name's rank here is its actual rank, not a guess.
For the wider picture we also carry the current official rankings from the UK Office for National Statistics, National Records of Scotland, INSEE in France and Statistics Canada — so you can see whether a name travels, not just whether it charts in America.
Some figures on the site are not counts but calculations: how many people with a name are alive today, how many will share it in a classroom, the typical age of someone who carries it. Those come from published actuarial life tables and birth cohorts, they are always labelled as estimates, and every formula is written out on the data and methodology page.
Two things the data cannot tell you: what a name means, and whether it suits your family. We try to be honest about that line rather than dressing up folklore as fact.
What it costs
Browsing every name, reading the guides, running quick battles, and voting, swiping or guessing on any link somebody shares with you are free forever, with no account. If you are deep in the deciding phase and want unlimited comparisons, vote pools, swipe decks and big tournaments, there is one one-time purchase — no subscription, because naming a baby ends.
Privacy, briefly
Voting never requires an account, and we never store the raw IP address of anyone who votes. Your shortlist is not sold, mailed or shown to anybody you did not send a link to. The privacy policy spells out the details.