Why Popularity Matters Less Than You Think: Part 1
First in a series to celebrate the release of the new US name data this weekend
This post is the first in a series exploring name popularity. The second part is here; the third part is here.
I’m writing about name popularity this weekend because it’s American Name Nerd Christmas—the weekend the Social Security Administration releases its new name data for the previous year. Always on the Friday before Mother’s Day. All the name blogs will be analyzing the movement on the list, the new names to enter the Top 10, the fastest climbers up the charts. Nameberry’s Substack has had a contest going for days to guess the new Top 10.
And I can’t deny, I look forward to this day like all the other name nerds. Knowing the most popular names in the United States is important for my consultant work, because it’s information that most of my clients want. And at my core, I’m still a sociologist; I love digging around in data, looking at trends and considering what they say about group behavior. In my pre-kid life, I definitely cleared this day for data-diving every year. But here’s what many years of name nerdery have taught me—here’s the secret.
Name popularity matters way, WAY less than you’d think.
I’m going to unpack that statement in three parts, over these three posts. Here’s the cliffs notes:
Popular names are less popular than they used to be.
Having access to a list of popular names doesn’t actually tell you much about the popular names in your community.
How popular someone’s name is matters way less to their life than the culture of name nerd blogs would suggest.
So without further ado, here’s Part 1:
Popular names just aren’t so popular anymore.
In the years I’ve been working with expectant parents, I’ve seen the same concern over and over. Regardless of ethnic background, socioeconomic status, cultural background, or region, pretty much everyone (or, at least, the portion of “everyone” who’s interested enough in names to talk to me about them) wants to avoid the most popular names.
People’s reasons for this vary, but they frequently circle around versions of “I was one of three Jessicas in my seventh grade class, and I don’t want that to happen to my kid.”
What most parents don’t realize is that almost nobody’s one of three Jessicas in a class anymore. Or three Olivias or Liams, either.
This is actually the phenomenon that turned my interest in names from a hobby into a research topic. I’ve been interested in names since I was a kid, so I was combing through the Social Security data long before I was looking for research projects. But sometime in grad school, I noticed something funny about the most popular names: they were covering a smaller percentage of kids than they had in the past.
As you can see, in the mid-60s, the Top 5 male names were given to almost 20% of all male1 babies born in the US. By the 1990s, that number had dropped to less than 10%. The percentage of female babies getting the Top 5 names also started to fall sharply in the ‘90s. One possible reason for this? The Social Security Administration started publishing Top 1000 name data in 1998. Once parents had the option of accessing cold hard data telling them what the most popular names were, a lot of them may have felt pressure to avoid using those names.
By 2023, the top 5 names covered only 4% of male babies and 3% of female babies. Meanwhile, 25% of male babies and 33% of female babies got a name that was outside the top 1000. Parents have been going further and further afield for decades, for all kinds of reasons that I’ll get into in future posts. I wrote a dissertation on this: believe me when I say I can talk about it for a long time.
But for this first post, on the day every name site will be talking about the most popular names, consider this your takeaway fun fact:
The #1 names last year were given to barely 1 in 100 babies. And about 1 in 4 babies has a name that doesn’t rank in the Top 1000 list at all.
Even if you want to avoid a name that’s so popular it’s going to make your kid one of three in their class, you don’t have to worry too much about the top 5 names.
Of course, nothing in life is a guarantee. Because even picking a less popular name, or a name outside the top 500–or even a name outside the top 1000–doesn’t mean you’ll never meet someone else with the same name.
More about that here.
In addition to my work here on Substack, I also work one-on-one with individuals and families looking to find names. I’ve been working as a name consultant for almost eight years and have dozens of satisfied clients. If you know someone who’s looking for the perfect name—for themself, their child, or someone or something else—please feel free to send them my way.
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As always, I acknowledge the problematic binary language used by the SSA, but for better or worse, for the moment, that’s how the data’s organized.