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Notes on names
Short, data-led pieces about how American names actually behave. Every figure comes from the same public datasets the tools run on.
Latest articles
The most common full names in America
Not James Smith, as it turns out. What happens when you multiply the top first names by the top surnames.
The names America abandoned
Debra went from 50,000 babies a year to barely three dozen. A look at the steepest collapses in the record.
Why unisex names almost always travel one way
Taylor, Morgan, Harper, Addison. Names cross from boys to girls and essentially never come back. Why?
About these pieces
Everything here is worked out from the Social Security Administration's national birth files and the Census Bureau's surname file — the same public data behind every tool on the site. Where a figure is an estimate rather than a direct count, it says so, and the methodology page explains how the estimates are produced.