Name Stats!

Danielle and I have been playing on Wolfram Alpha and looking up names to see their relative popularity over time. Here are some of the groundbreaking statistics we unearthed...


Every kid was named susan in the 50's. If you had a daughter and you lived in the suburbs, you experienced considerable peer pressure to name her Susan.
Likewise, in that same time period, American families were fascinated with baudy Italian humor. Lots of booze, lots of cigarettes, easy smiles, and pleny of baby Deans.
For a decade, parents decided that the name Chris was not just for boys anymore -then in the 70's they decided that it it was.
And where is Burton? That name is covered by the straight black axis line you see at the bottom of the chart. Burton has always been a niche option for bold parents.

The Pasqualis decided that even though nobody named their kids Dean anymore, they were just going to do it anyways. Nobody tells them what to do. So now you have Dean Pasquali (jr.) and a bunch of other Deans who are approaching retirement.

Where did Danielle come from? Did everyone who went to high school in the early 70's get assigned the name Danielle in French class? And then...just as mysteriously and rapidly as it appeared, the name Danielle gets tossed into oblivion. Danielle is sooo Regan administration and, these days, just as conservative.

Appropriately, the name John has experienced a predicable and steady decline over the century. Parents in steady proportion have decided that 6 Johns in every classroom was plenty.

People who were ruined in the Great Depression and then terrified by the Second World War expressed their angst and grief by naming their babies Carol. Then a generation later they shifted over to Cheryl because it sounded pretty much the same and scratched their Carol itch but without the saturated market.

Bryce is that little brown lump on the left. These days, if you are in an emerging economic class and you are feeling a little sassy, you might consider naming your son Bryce. Or, if you are having a baby 36 years ago and wanted to name your son after a magnificent hole in the ground, you might do the same.

So what did the next generation do? They named their kids after trees and animals and cities and crap like that -names so bizzare that internet search engines don't know what to do with them so they give up and draw a flight plan between Willow AK, Juneau AK, and Bear DE.

Charles has suffered a similar fate to John. But this is to be expected, as names of such awesomeness and gravitas will eventually get worn out.

That blip on the right is Kadence -there have been four Kadences in all of history.

In the 1990's there was a significant tax incentive to name your daughter Taylor. So, expectedly, everybody in the country went for it. And when the tax advandage was repealed in 2000, the general population gave up on it.

The path tracking the popularity of Walker is perfectly correlated to the popularity of a man named Chuck Norris. The name Walker burst onto the scene in the mid 90's and gave Americans a roundhouse kick to the face.

Good old Nelson didn't wait for the 1980's/1990's craze of using last names as first names and was a real trend setter. Nelson has been advocating for Surnames-as-Givens for a century.

By the way, check out the scale on the left. We are dealing with exponentially rare names. That rise you see for Amya was actually generated by the naming of Amya.

Good old solid Daniel; a stalwart name that's always been pretty much around. Risk-weary soldiers returning from WWII named their sons the safe and reliable Daniel. Then, in the mid 80's popularity declined following the birth of Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter).

The good old disco-loving, bell-bottom-wearing, feathered-hear-sporting population was abuzz over Tracy and then one day in 1970 the nation packed up their frilly tuxedo shirtsand stopped naming their babies Tracy.

As in real life, Kevin dominates Kirk and Kory. Kevin kicked the doors in on the 50's and just won't quit. Kirk experienced a modest showing a decade later. Kory became a very specific option for parents in the mid to late 70's who whished childhood strardom for their boys. And sometimes it worked!

How do you solve a name like Suria? This name is such a rarity -perhaps an isolated incident, that internet search engines again give up and grasp at vague geographic placenames. Suria, Spain, for instance. Temperate climate, bitingly witty townsfolk. You can hop a plane from Crystal, WI to Suria, Spain and expect to travel for about 11 hours. Though it may feel considerably longer than that.