Is your name rare?

Rare compared with what?

“Rare” only means something against a baseline. A name shared by five thousand Americans sounds plentiful, but in a country of 342 million that is one person in roughly seventy thousand — you could live a long life and never meet another. Our scale is built around that experience rather than the raw number: it asks how likely you are to run into a namesake, not how big the number looks.

The six tiers

• Very common — more than 40,000 people. Expect duplicates in any large organisation.
• Fairly common — 8,000 to 40,000. You will meet namesakes occasionally.
• Uncommon — 1,000 to 8,000. Rarely a clash, but the name is not unheard of.
• Very rare — 100 to 1,000. Everyone with this name would fit in one hall.
• Extremely rare — under 100. Meeting a match would be genuinely remarkable.
• Virtually unique — fewer than five expected nationally.

A caution about very rare results

The rarer the answer, the less you should trust its precision. When the model estimates eleven people, the honest reading is “somewhere between a handful and a few dozen”. Small numbers come from multiplying two small probabilities, and any error in either gets amplified. Treat the tier as the real answer and the count as an illustration of it.