NamePlay Blog

How combining sound-equivalent spellings changes the list of names that reached #1 in the US, and which names enter or fall off the top spot once spellings are summed.

What names mark white America?

What names mark Multiracial America?

What names mark Hispanic America?

What names mark Black America?

What names mark Asian and NHPI America?

What names mark Native American communities?

America's 25 most common first names belong overwhelmingly to one demographic, with two telling exceptions.

Until 1954, most babies with 'eigh' in their name were boys.

Sparkline charts tracing the rise and fall of the most popular U.S. baby names that have gone extinct: three or more years with zero recorded births through 2024.

Sparkline charts tracing the rise and fall of the 50 most popular baby names in the United States since 1880.

Watch gender-neutral baby names spread across the United States in an animated map from 1930 to 2024, showing regional patterns and the rise and fall of unisex naming.

A state-by-state heatmap showing where gender-neutral baby names are most popular across the US, with controls for gender-balance threshold and pronunciation grouping.

How do the most popular unisex baby names split between boys and girls?

Not the most perfectly balanced names, but the names that surpass a certain threshold of popularity for both genders.

What names are truly the most non-binary?

Using data, we can find pairs of names with the most similar popularity trends in each decade.

Names containing 'eigh', and births with them, peaked in 2019 and have declined 17% and 31% respectively since then.

Efficiently finding all names that differ by a single letter in the SSA baby name dataset, and exploring which names are one letter off from the most other names.

Does telling a large language model when and where a name has been used lead to better name origin guesses?