Why Names Rise and Fall
The SSA file does not record why any individual family chose a name, so this page makes no claims about motives. What the data does show, across 145 years, is a small set of recurring statistical shapes, and those shapes are the honest way to talk about names rising and falling. The first shape is the long plateau: a name holds a high rank for decades, changing slowly, because each generation of parents is largely choosing from the names the previous generation made familiar. The leaders of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries mostly follow this shape, with decade totals in the millions built from forty or fifty consecutive strong years.
The second shape is the sharp peak: a name climbs quickly, reaches a high point within a few years, and declines almost as fast. Sharp peaks become more common in the later twentieth century and dominate the recent data, where the interval between a name entering the top hundred and leaving it has shortened considerably. The third shape is the slow fade, in which a former leader loses a few ranks a year for half a century without any single dramatic drop, ending as a name everyone recognises but few newborns receive. All three shapes are visible purely in counts and ranks, and the individual name pages on this site let you classify each of the all-time top hundred into one of them from its decade table alone.
One structural change underlies much of the modern pattern: the flattening of the top of the table. In the 1880s the leading girls' name alone took over nine percent of recorded girl births; in 2024 the leader's share was under one percent. With the top share compressed, modern rankings are more volatile, because a difference of a few hundred births can move a name several places, while the leaders of a century ago were protected by enormous absolute leads. Any claim that a current name is surging or collapsing should therefore be checked against counts and shares, not rank alone, and that check is built into every data page on this site.
The shapes described above also explain why revivals, when they appear in the data, look the way they do. A name returning after a long fade does not usually reappear at its former rank: it re-enters low in the table, often below the top hundred entirely, and climbs over a run of consecutive years before it becomes visible on a page like the year tables published here. That slow re-entry is itself evidence about how naming spreads in the record, gradually and across many unrelated families rather than in a single season. Readers tracing a possible revival on this site should therefore start from the name's own page and its decade table, where a genuine return shows as a rising sequence of decade totals after a long decline, rather than from any single year's rank, where a small count change can imitate the start of a revival that the following years do not confirm.
All of the conventions described here are applied uniformly across this site: the name pages, the year tables, the decade tables, and the state pages all draw on the same SSA files, the same release rules, and the same definitions of count, rank, and share. The full source statement, including coverage and limitations, is on the methodology page, and corrections or questions about any figure can be sent through the contact page, where every message is read against the underlying file before a reply is sent.
Disclaimer: Baby Name Data publishes statistics drawn from U.S. Social Security Administration baby name records. Figures are counts of Social Security card applications by year of birth and are shown for general information only. Counts below five in any year, sex, or state are not released by the SSA and are not estimated here. Nothing on this page is advice about what to name a child.
Data: U.S. Social Security Administration baby name records, 1880–2024, retrieved October 2026. Source: ssa.gov/oact/babynames/