How popular is your name?
What’s the point of trying to be productive and thinking about smarter ways to get thing done, if you can’t goof off sometimes and waste some time?
I wasted a bit of time this afternoon on a web site that charts the popularity of given names 
over the last 120 years. It’s interesting stuff.
Personally the news is rather depressing:
On the other hand, “Paris” gives you a chuckle and “Edgar” is a surprise. There are worse ways to entertain yourself for 30 minutes.
The information comes from birth records in the USA as reported by its Social Security Administration.
[Via David Pogue ]
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August 30th, 2006 at 2:03 am
Very cool.
Yolanda is surprisingly popular…
August 30th, 2006 at 3:05 am
It’s funny that so many groups of names that don’t seem to be that related (except maybe that they start with the same letter) seem to follow the same trends.
I wonder if there are some sampling problems with this. (they connect data points with straight lines, but I have a feeling there are actually very few points… I wonder if that’s just them averaging over large groups of years and putting the averages at a few points) Or could that many names be that closely linked?
Freakonomics had a whole section on naming trends. Apparently names start with the rich. The lower classes pick up the name and as it becomes more popular, rich people stop using it. This happens over and over again, so much that you can predict trends based on what the rich are naming their children. Additionally, some names come in cycles as they go from being popular to unpopular. Names that start with the lowest money die off quickly. And it’s amazing how many different spellings there are of popular names.
August 30th, 2006 at 9:45 am
Interesting link, Ted. Thanks.
I was amazed at the trend for “Paris” which made me wonder about the role of celebrity, past and present. The Vera (Lynn?) spike is pretty amazing too.
Are celebrities the new aristocrats in this?
October 21st, 2006 at 10:53 am
[...] You’ve never met them. You only know their name. Can you know their exact age? No, but you can get a pretty good ballpark guess if they are Americans. Just type their name into this online tool. (via NYT and hawkwings). [...]