Choosing a name for your baby is hard. This dashboard lets you explore the choices that American parents have been making over the years. We’ve used the baby name data from the Social Security Administration, covering the years from 1880 to 2014. We’ve assigned each name a score out of 100 on four factors: 1) total births, 2) popularity in 2014, 3) newness, and 4) trendiness. You can play with the slider controls to find names with whatever mix of the four factors you’re interested in. You can also look up specific names and compare their scores. Click on a name in the table to see its trend over time in the chart below the table. You can control-click on multiple names to chart multiple trend lines.
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Are all the names from the Social Security dataset included?
No. We filtered out names with total births less than 100.
Why can popularity score and trend score be set to -1?
-1 for popularity score means that there were fewer than 5 births with the chosen name in 2014. -1 for trend score means that there wasn’t enough recent data to establish a trend for the name.
Just tell me how to find the trendy names!
The simplest way is to set Peak Year to 2014. This shows you all the names that peaked in relative popularity in 2014 so they’re all on an upward trajectory. If you want to find more old fashioned names that are catching on, then try lowering the upper limit of the Newness score and increasing the lower limit of the Trend score.
How about a glossary?
- First Year: the first year the name appeared in the baby name dataset
- Last Year: the last year the name appeared in the baby name dataset
- Peak Year: the year in which the name peaked in relative popularity
- Last Year Births: the number of babies given the name in its last year in the dataset
- Total Births: the total number of babies given the name in all years in the dataset
- Total Births Score: the rank of the name’s total births scaled between 0 and 100
- Popularity Score: the rank of the name’s births in 2014 scaled between 0 and 100
- Newness Score: the rank of the first year the name appeared in the dataset scaled between 0 and 100
- Trend Score: calculate the 3-year rolling mean of births, then calculate the % change from 2012 to 2014, then rank and scale between 0 and 100