Your name's percentile

Two honest answers to one question

Ask how rare a name is and you can measure it two ways, which is why this page shows both. Counting names, almost everything is rare: the dataset holds over forty thousand first names and the overwhelming majority belong to only a few hundred people each. By that measure any name you have actually heard of lands in the top few percent.

Counting people gives a very different answer, and it is the one that matches lived experience. What you want to know is whether you will meet a namesake, and that depends on how many people carry the name, not on how many names exist. The commonness score uses a log scale across the population for exactly that reason.

Why a log scale

Name frequency is extraordinarily skewed. The most common first name in America is carried by millions; the median one by a few hundred. On a linear scale every name except the top handful would be squashed into the bottom sliver of the chart and the comparison would be useless. A log scale spreads them out so the difference between a thousand and ten thousand reads as clearly as the difference between a million and ten million.