Where our numbers come from

Nothing on this site is crowd-sourced, scraped from a forum or invented to fill a page. Every rank and count is published by a national statistics agency. Everything we calculate on top of those counts is explained below, with the formula, so you can check our work — or disagree with it.

Official sources

The backbone is the United States federal record, because it is the deepest public naming dataset in the world: 145 years, 117,820 distinct names, national and state level.

US Social Security Administration — National baby names
Every name given to five or more babies of one sex in a year, 1880–2024
US Social Security Administration — Baby names by state
The same counts split across all 50 states and DC, 1880–2024
US Social Security Administration — Actuarial life table (Table 4.C.6)
Survival probability by age and sex — the basis for every “alive today” estimate

For the “around the world” figures on each name page we use the current official rankings published by 4 more agencies:

Canada — Statistics Canada, 2024 (published top 101 per sex)
England & Wales — Office for National Statistics, 2024 (published top 100 per sex)
France — INSEE, 2025 (published top 100 per sex)
Scotland — National Records of Scotland, 2025 (published top 103 per sex)

Notable people named X come from Wikidata, a public structured database maintained by the Wikimedia community. That is the one source on this list that is community-edited, and we label it as such wherever it appears.

What is measured and what is estimated

This distinction matters more than any single number, so we keep it explicit everywhere on the site.

Measured — taken directly from the agency files, with no modelling by us: every rank, every yearly birth count, peak year, first year on record, state-level counts and every foreign ranking.

Estimated — calculated by us from those measured counts. Estimates are always phrased as estimates (“about”, “roughly”, “expect”) and never presented as a record. The four models we run are below.

How each estimate is calculated

People alive today with a name

We take every recorded birth for the name, one year at a time, and multiply it by the probability that someone born in that year is still alive, using the Social Security Administration's published actuarial life table for that sex. Adding those products gives the estimate:

living ≈ Σ (births in year Y × survival probability at age [current year − Y])

Two honest limitations: the table is a national average, so it knows nothing about a specific family, and the SSA data counts Social Security card applications rather than every birth, so names given to people who never applied are under-counted.

How many will share the name in a classroom

We compare the name's most recent birth count with the size of a single-sex birth cohort (about 1,800,000 babies) and scale it to a class of 25 children:

per class = (births with the name ÷ cohort size) × 25

It answers the real question parents ask — “will there be three of them in her class?” — but it assumes a classroom that mirrors the country. Regional taste is strong in naming, so check the state pages too.

The typical age of someone with the name

We find the weighted median birth year across everyone ever given the name: the year by which half of all people carrying it had been born. Subtracting it from the current year gives the typical age. A name with two separate popularity waves has a median sitting between them, which is why we call it typical rather than average.

Fashion outlook

A transparent scoring heuristic, not a prophecy. It reads three measured facts — how many separate decades the name held a top-100 place, where it sits relative to its own peak, and how fast it is currently moving — and returns how likely the name is to read as “of its era” about 15 years from now. A name that charted across six or more decades scores lowest, because it has already survived several fashion cycles. We show the reasoning in a sentence next to the score; no part of it is a black box.

How a name is called rising, falling or a comeback

One rule, applied to every name identically. We compare the current rank with the rank five years earlier. A move of more than 15% counts as rising or falling; smaller moves are steady. A rising name whose peak was more than twenty years ago is labelled a comeback rather than a riser. Names outside the top 2,000 are called rare, because ranks that deep move for statistical reasons rather than real changes in taste.

When the data is refreshed

The SSA publishes new US figures each spring; the other agencies publish on their own schedules through the year. We reload every source when it appears, recompute all derived statistics, and the current dataset was last refreshed on 2025-05-01. Historical years never change retroactively, so a chart you read today will look the same next year, with one more point on the end.

Corrections

If a number here disagrees with the agency that published it, that is a bug and we want to know. Write to support@babynamebattles.com and we will fix it or explain the difference.