Every given name on record for U.S. births, year by year, next to the names it was competing with. Type a name to chart it.
Browse meaning & history pages for every top-100 name since 1880 →
🍼 Enjoying this? Buy my baby a diaper
Made by one person, due to become a father any week now. No ads, no tracking.
A name is only listed for a year if at least five babies of that sex were given it, so rare names appear as broken lines rather than continuous ones, and a gap means “fewer than five,” not zero. Records cover people issued a Social Security number, so coverage before the late 1930s is a fraction of actual births and early lines understate real usage.
Rank counts the names strictly more common that year, plus one, so tied names share a rank. On exact spelling, every spelling is its own name: Sara and Sarah are two names, as are Katherine, Catherine and Kathryn.
Sound-alike spellings groups each name with the spellings that read the same aloud, and adds their births together. The grouping is computed from the spelling, not looked up in a dictionary: it builds a pronunciation key from the consonant frame, the sound of the first vowel and the sound of the final vowel. That is what separates Isabel and Isabelle from Isabella while keeping Haley, Hailey, Haleigh and Hayley together, which a simple typo distance cannot do, since both pairs are two letters apart.
The origin line under the name comes from a curated set of 816 one-line notes, one per sound family, so every spelling in a family shares one note; together they cover every name that has ever ranked in a yearly top 100 and the names behind 82% of all births on record. Every covered name also has its own page with a fuller written history — the full index is here. Name etymology is often genuinely contested, and where it is, the note says so instead of picking a side.
The key is a heuristic and it makes two kinds of mistake. It over-groups when one spelling drops a vowel another writes, so Carol lands with Carl and Danielle with Daniel. It under-groups when the same sound is spelled with different consonants, so Sean stays apart from Shawn. Every spelling in a group is listed with its own total and can be switched off, and any other spelling can be typed into the group by hand, so the final grouping is yours rather than the algorithm's. Rank in this mode compares your group against the automatic grouping of every other name.