About this site

Most baby-name sites tell you what a name supposedly means. We tell you what a name is actually doing: how many babies get it, whether it's rising or fading, where in the country it's biggest, and how today compares with the last 145 years.

Every number on this site comes from one source: the United States Social Security Administration's public baby-name dataset, which covers Social Security card applications for births since 1880. We don't editorialize the data and we don't publish name "meanings" unless we can back them with a vetted source — which is why you won't find any here yet.

What you can do here

• Generator— filter ~5,000 real names by popularity, style, and sound, and build a shareable shortlist.
• Name Time Machine— see how any name ranked the year you (or grandma) were born.
• Lists— from the current top 100 to vintage comebacks and names under 100 babies a year.

Details on the dataset and our calculations are on the Data Source page.