Name popularity, year by year

146 years in one line

The Social Security Administration has published national baby-name counts back to 1880, which makes it one of the longest continuous cultural datasets in existence. Plotted as a line, a name’s history is startlingly legible: you can see the sharp spike of a hit television character, the long plateau of a biblical standard, or the slow collapse of a name that simply went out of fashion.

What the shapes mean

A tall narrow spike is almost always a single cultural event — a film, a song, a public figure. A broad rounded hill is organic fashion, rising and falling over thirty or forty years. A flat line near the bottom with a sudden recent lift is a revival, and these have become far more common as parents reach back a century for names their own grandparents would recognise.

Counts, not rank

The chart shows absolute births rather than rank, which matters because American naming has fragmented. A name ranked 40th today has far fewer babies behind it than a name ranked 40th in 1950, because parents now spread across many more names. Rank flatters modern names; counts tell you how many people were actually given it.