Throughout my time as a student I was used to being known with a last initial. My first name Emma has consistently ranked in the top 5 for girls since 2002. Though my parents were slightly ahead of the curve in 1998, the ubiquity of my first name means I’m rarely the only Emma in a room.
I remember when my mom told me they considered Anastasia for both my sister and I and how my thoughts became transfixed to the parallel universe version of myself who shared a name with the lost Russian princess. In middle school I briefly flirted with the idea of having a more unique name, signing my emails with Esmerelda and Chrysanthemum. While my brief rebrand is mostly attributable to middle school-era awkwardness, the individuality I was searching for still reflects the broader obsession we have with baby names. People want their kids to be special, and a name is the first choice where parents can make that happen.
“When people choose a name, it’s a form of self-expression, a way to establish a legacy and make a statement about your tastes and priorities by conforming to or bucking trends,” Elizabeth Cohen, a communications Professor at West Virginia University, told The Cut in 2019.
Comprehensive data from the Social Security Administration speaks to what the current and rising trends are, albeit with a slight delay. For the analyses here, I used the Social Security Administration’s bulk data, which is available at the state and national level. While SSA’s interactive website allows you to query the Top 1,000 names, this database contains every name with at least five babies born that year. The database divides the top names by male and female births, and I used Python to examine ranking trends, unique names, popular endings and more before creating final visualizations using a mix of Datawrapper and Adobe Illustrator.
Emma’s resurgence came at a time when classic sounding names with alternating consonants and vowels were becoming popular again. Pop culture likely thrusted it into the top five too. In the final episode of Season 8 of “Friends”, released in May 2002, Ross and Rachel named their baby Emma. The name was #4 that year.
Emily also had dominated the #1 spot in the 90s and early 2000s, and its exit from first in 2008 ushered in a brief power struggle between Emma, Isabella, and Sophia. Emma eventually held onto the top spot for five years from 2014-2019, before Olivia bumped it down to second.
As a data journalist, I’ve covered a number of angles on baby names. I’ve contributed to stories on U.K. vs. U.S. naming trends, uniquely popular names in every state, influence of famous characters, etc. There’s an insatiable appetite for baby name stories.
The appeal on the data side is clear. The baby name database from the Social Security Administration is available at a far-reaching and granular level. It has data dating back to 1880 for each state, and every single name bestowed upon at least five babies is listed. It’s a huge scale of information available for free on a buzzy topic.
Social media has inevitably amplified our fascination with baby names. One infamous meme shows an expectant mother crossing off the names Taylee, McKarty, Nayvie, and Maylee, landing on Lakynn. Facebook groups and subreddits have emerged where users share names with less than universal acclaim. TikTok has intensified this further with baby name gurus and trending name videos.
As the search for a one of a kind baby name has risen, the share of babies born with the top five names has fallen dramatically.
State level data reveals how much this varies across regions. For female births, the differences are most stark. Over one in ten girls born in Vermont, Rhode Island, and Wyoming in 2023 had a top 5 name whereas Texas, Mississippi, and Georgia reported the smallest share, below 4.6%.
As the gap shrinks between the top baby names and middle-ranking baby names, we’re also seeing a rise in the number of unique names.
Namesakes have become less common compared to the 20th century when people were often named for relatives. According to a YouGov survey, more people have middle names after a family member than their first name.
Unique baby names can come from finding inspiration from objects or places. When I dug into data on the most distinctive names by state for a story, I found landmarks and cities like Atigun in Alaska and Sedona in Arizona influenced names regionally.
Notably, girls’ names have been much more subject to the unique naming trends. Researchers who have explored the uniqueness disparity have coined the term the “playground effect”. Parents tend to worry more about cruelty and bullying for their sons.
Additionally, marketing around baby name tips is still largely targeted towards mothers, and the same YouGov survey suggests that when only one parent chooses the name, it is more likely the mother.
The share of unique names today is close to a level last seen in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Early waves of immigration likely played a role here as the decline in unique names overlaps some with the drop in American children to foreign-born mothers in the early 1900s. When we talk about baby name data, the role of online trends is obviously a fun discussion point, but shifting name popularity also speaks to immigration and changing demographics. In my analysis on the most distinctive names in every state, trends in some states spoke to this. The top names in New York for example were ethnically Jewish and names with Arabic origins were featured in states like Michigan, which reports high Arab-American population relative to the nation.
Some of the surge in unique baby names is born from an effort to spell names differently from their traditions. The popularity of leigh names has become a poster child for this shift. While at one point it may have seemed like leigh names were everywhere, data shows other ly suffixes remained dominant even during leigh’s peak.
Ashley was a leading name throughout the 80s, and challenger spellings like Ashleigh and Ashlee also emerged. It wasn’t until the 2000s that the infamous leigh started to truly ramp up though. The rise of blogs and social media likely played a part here, amplifying alternatives like Everleigh or Kyleigh that otherwise may not have taken off.
Given U.S. demographics, names that are more popular among white parents make up a higher share of total births. Trends in specific unique names can also be hard to pinpoint because of variable spelling and SSA’s five baby minimum. However, Leigh names, stereotypically associated with white mommy bloggers and with a common suffix, easily grouped together as a name fad, as well as target for online ire (see r/tragedeigh).
Recently though, all kinds of ly suffixes have begun to decline.
One more key trend is the rise in gender neutral names. While this may be partially driven by some families eschewing gender norms for their children, the search for unique names for girls comes into play again too.
For Blake, the rising number of girls with that name coincided with a falling number of boys. Blake Lively may have helped normalize her name for girls. Time will tell if Lively’s daughter James will cause a similar impact.
In the case of Charlie, more girls are receiving the historically masculine name, but it still remains popular among both sexes.
For names like Alexis it’s declining popularity among girls caused nearly the same amount of boys and girls to be born with that name in 2023. Azariah and Finley are seeing matching popularity for both male and female babies.
There can be immense pressure to naming a baby. For many people, this will be the name their children use when seeking jobs, dating, and going about their adult life. Even if we don’t want there to be, there are still preconceived biases that are associated with names. The market around baby names speaks to this general desire to balance the search for individuality with a realistic understanding of those factors.
For those of us who work with data, the shifting standards of how we name our kids provides a playground for exploring the pop culture influences, shifting demographics, and changing social standards behind baby name trends.
Emma Rubin
Emma Rubin is a freelance data journalist and visualization designer based in Seattle, Washington. Previously, she oversaw graphics and data driven storytelling at Stacker. She is passionate about uncovering stories within public datasets and discovering creative ways to visualize them.
