How old is your name?

Why names have an age

Ask someone to picture a Linda, a Jennifer, a Madison and a Nova, and most Americans will picture four different generations. They are right to. Naming fashion moves in waves roughly seventy years long, and a name that dominated one decade is often nearly absent from the next. The result is that a first name is one of the strongest casual signals of age we have.

Births are not the same as people

Most name sites stop at birth counts, which quietly answers the wrong question. Linda was given to well over a million American babies, but Linda peaked in 1947 and attrition since then has been considerable. This tool applies survival rates by birth year, so the profile you see describes people estimated to be alive now. For names that peaked recently the two figures are close; for mid-century names the gap is large.

Reading the profile

The median age is the single most useful number: half of everyone with the name is older, half younger. The generation bars show where the name’s weight actually sits, and names with two separate peaks — a mid-century run and a modern revival — show up clearly as a split profile rather than one hump.