About Your Name Through Time
Your parents chose your name in a particular year, and the year is written all over it. This tool looks it up in the Social Security Administration’s national baby-names dataset — every first name given to five or more babies in a year, one file per year since 1880, 117,820 name-and-sex pairs in all — and tells you the rank your name held the year you were born, how many babies shared it, what fraction of all births that was, the year it peaked, and where it stands in the latest year published.
Two honesty rules. Trends and peaks are measured on share of births, not raw counts, because the 1880 file records under a hundred thousand girls and a modern one records 1.6 million; comparing counts across a century would flatter the present. And the tool says plainly what it does not have: the SSA’s state files are not bundled, so there is no regional breakdown here. ssa.gov blocks server requests, so the data is fetched through a browser once a year and bundled — refreshed each May when the new year is published.
A sibling, a partner, the name you nearly got. Up to three more names on the same axis as yours.
How to Use Your Name Through Time
Type a first name, choose girls, boys or either, enter a birth year and trace it. The headline is the rank the name held that year; beneath it, how many babies were given it and what share of that year’s births they were. The three cards give the peak year, the standing in the latest published year, and the all-time total since 1880. The decade table shows the whole arc in fifteen rows, and the top ten of your birth year puts your name in its company — with the name that holds your rank today, which is usually the line people screenshot.
Reading a Name’s Curve
Most names follow one of three shapes. The classic (Mary, John, William) held a top rank for generations and declined slowly as the pool of names widened — Mary was #1 for girls every year from 1880 to 1946 and again in the early 1950s, and is still given to over two thousand girls a year. The surge (Jennifer, Jessica, Ashley, Jason) went from obscurity to #1 in under twenty years and fell just as fast; Jessica held #1 in 1985 and was #665 by 2025. And the revival (Emma, Olivia, Henry, Theodore) peaked around 1900, all but vanished in the 1970s, and came back to the top ten a century later. Knowing the shape tells you what your name signals about the year you arrived.
Why the Numbers Are Per 100,000
The 1880 file records 90,994 girls and 110,490 boys; a recent year records over three million babies. Social Security numbers were not issued until 1936, and people born earlier only appear if they applied for one later in life, so the early decades under-count badly. Comparing raw counts across the century would make every old name look like a footnote and every modern name look enormous. Share of that year’s recorded births is the standard correction, and it is what the peak year, the trend and the subscriber chart all use.
Ranks, Ties and the Five-Baby Floor
Ranks are computed separately for girls and boys within a year, by count, with ties sharing a rank (two names with the same count both get #14, and the next name is #16). The SSA suppresses any name given to fewer than five babies of a sex in a year, so a rare name can drop out of the data entirely in a lean year and reappear later; the decade table shows those gaps honestly as zeros rather than smoothing them over. Names that appear for both sexes (Jessica has a small boys’ line every year) are listed separately, and the tool mentions the other list when it exists.
What the Data Cannot Tell You
It cannot tell you why: the SSA counts names, not reasons. It does not merge spellings, so Catherine, Katherine, Kathryn and Katharine are four separate lines, and a name that is common across variants can look rarer than it is. It does not include a middle name, nicknames, or a person who never got a Social Security number. And it is national only — there is a state-level dataset, but it is not bundled here, so this page offers no regional breakdown rather than a guessed one.
Related tools: the Baby Name Finder to search the same dataset by rarity, trend and era, What Things Cost for what your birth year looked like at the checkout, and The Day You Were Born for the weather and the moon that day. Browse every Fun & Novelty tool for more.
Source: Social Security Administration national baby-names data (names given to five or more babies of one sex per year), 1880 through the latest year published; refreshed each May. Ranks are competition ranks within sex and year. Shares are per 100,000 of that sex’s recorded births in the same year. No regional data is included.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where does this data come from?
The Social Security Administration publishes, every May, a file for each year since 1880 listing every first name given to at least five babies of one sex in the United States, with the count. That is the entire source — no surveys, no estimates. Names with fewer than five occurrences in a year are withheld by the SSA for privacy, which is why a very rare spelling can be absent even though it exists. Ranks are computed within a sex and year; ties share a rank.
Why does the tool talk about "per 100,000 births" instead of just the count?
Because raw counts lie across decades. Only 90,994 girls' names were recorded in 1880 — Social Security cards did not exist until 1936 and the early files are far from complete — against about 1.6 million in a recent year. So a name given to 5,000 girls in 1890 was a colossal hit while 5,000 today is rank 60-something. Share of births puts 1918 and 2025 on the same scale, and it is what the peak, the trend and the chart use.
Why is my name's peak year different from its peak rank year?
Because the two measure different things. Peak year is the year with the most babies given the name; peak rank is the best position it reached against every other name. A name can hit #1 in a low-birth year and have its largest raw count in a baby-boom year at #4 — Michael, #1 in 1985, actually peaked in count in 1957. The tool shows both, and the subscriber chart shows the whole shape rather than one summary.
What does "rising" or "falling" mean here?
The five-year change in the name's share of births: rising if the share grew at least 15%, falling if it shrank at least 13%, steady in between — computed on share, not count, so a falling birth rate does not make every name look like it is declining. The streak counts consecutive years of growth up to the latest year, which is how the finder spots names on a genuine run rather than a one-year blip.
Can I see my name's popularity by state?
Not in this tool, and the page says so rather than guessing. The SSA publishes a separate state-by-state dataset that is not bundled here, and the national file cannot be split by region. What the national data does support — and what this page shows — is the year-by-year national count and rank back to 1880, the peak, the trend, the top ten of your birth year, and the name that holds your birth-year rank today.
