Baby Name Popularity Charted by Gender
======================================
Complete list of names and charts available
Here is the main content of this project: 254 names charted by gender
popularity from 1970 to 2005. A list of all the charts allows you to view
one chart at a time or multiple charts side-by-side. It is also possible
to simply view all the charts on one page. More details follow.
These pages contain 254 charts that compare the popularity (in the United
States) of several baby names given to boys and to girls. I pulled the names
from the top-1000 baby name lists available from the Social Security
Administration website, generating charts for all baby names that appeared
in both genders' lists in at least one year from 1970 to 2005. When I was
processing the data and generating the charts, 2005 was the most recent year
available. Gaps in a name chart indicate that the name was not popular enough
for one or both genders to make one or both top-1000 list that year or series
of years. Please take a look at the SSA Popular Names Background Information
for more details about the data behind these charts.
Each image has the same data charted twice at different scales. The top chart
is drawn at the same scale in every image to better compare relative popularity
between names. The bottom chart is scaled to fit the data for each name to
better display each name's popularity trends. With some very popular names
(e.g. Jennifer), the data is partially or entirely beyond the scale of
the upper chart, and must be shrunk to fit in the lower one.
The lower chart features more detail. The blue dot indicates the most recent
year of available data for each name. A hollow blue dot represents the year
2005 in particular (the end of available data at the time the charts were
generated). A hollow black dot represents the year 1970 (the earliest data I
considered). All other years are shown as a simple black dot.
For example, take a look at 'Jordan' below. Jordan first appeared as a
top-1000 name for both genders in 1978, grew in popularity for a while before
beginning to decline again. During this time, Jordan was always given
predominately to males. Compare this with 'Guadalupe', a predominately female
name and one of only a few names that was in the top-1000 for both genders in
every year from 1970 to 2005. Guadalupe's popularity appeared to be stable
for quite a while after 1970, gained sharply as a name for females (but
remained about as popular as before for males) and again appears to be fairly
stable. However, the more male 'Jordan' remains the more popular of the two
names, even for females, and even as its popularity appears to decline.
Now, go ahead and start browsing the charts.
Here are a few selections of names that might be interesting:
Names that have been losing popularity since at least 1970:
Dana, Kerry, Leslie, Lynn, Robin, Shannon, Shawn, Stacy, Terry
Some gender-balanced names that have become popular more recently:
Avery, Cameron, Dakota, Hayden, Jordan, Riley, Taylor
Names with multiple spellings:
Devan, Devin, Devon, Devyn
Payton, Peyton
Casey, Kasey
Jaime, Jamie, Jayme (Jaime has been surprisingly consistent for males)
"Placeholder" names, apparently put on birth certificates when the parents
hadn't picked a name yet:
Baby, Infant, Unknown
I will turn these names into links tomorrow some time. I also intend to fix
up the php that's displaying the images to make it easier to compare several
charts with each other. [finished 2007-07-11]
All charts were generated using R. I don't feel like the charts are really
"finished" yet, but I am not likely to go back and work on them more in the
future. In particular, I would like to have the values for the initial and
final years of each chart, but none of my attempts were satisfactory. Also,
haveing year labels at points of interest (shifts in popularity) would be
very nice to see, but doing this automatically is not trivial for me, and
doing it by hand for every chart is certainly not trivial either. Some flaws
in the charts stem partially from my inexperience with R. I had not used it
before starting this project, and in some ways it shows. If you have
questions, comments, or recommendations about this project, feel free to send
email to ehall at freeshell dot org.
[2007-07-29] I updated the images to correct the web address at the bottom,
and removed some extraneous information from the filenames while I was at it.
[2018-02-18] I moved this project to freeshell from a now-defunct host.
Evan Hall
2007-06-28
--
--
Changelog:
A text-only list of charts is available in addition to the page full of
images. Both pages are ordered alphabetically. There are 254 names/charts.
2007-05-01
--
For a page full of name charts, see the image directory. More information
is forthcoming.
2007-04-18
--
These files have been relocated to freeshell from their now-defunct former host.
2018-02-18
--
--
Notice:
The contents of this page and the name chart images may be distributed freely
and unconditionally. If you wish to reproduce the chart images on your web
page, please host them locally rather than linking to them here.