Your name through the years

How it works

The numbers are real: the US Social Security Administration publishes how many babies received each name every year, all the way back to 1880. We chart your name's whole run, girls and boys separately, and tell you its biggest year. Watch Linda spike in the 1940s, or Liam come from nowhere.

Two honest footnotes from SSA itself: a name only appears in a year once at least five babies of one sex received it, and the earliest decades undercount, because Social Security numbers did not exist before 1936 and not everyone born earlier got one.

If your name never appears, that is an answer too: it means your name has stayed rarer than five recorded babies a year, every year, which is its own kind of special. We say that rather than draw a fake line.