What this is, and where the numbers come from
Name Legacy charts how American given names have risen and fallen since 1880, using the birth records the Social Security Administration publishes each year.
Two public datasets, both from the SSA. The national file covers 1880 to 2025 and holds 105,966 distinct names. The state file covers 1910 to 2025 and is what the state pages are built from.
The SSA withholds any name given to fewer than five babies in a year, and in the state file, fewer than five in a single state in a single year. That is why a name's line breaks rather than dropping to zero: the births happened, the record is simply not published. Nothing here interpolates across those gaps.
The records cover people issued a Social Security number at birth. Someone who immigrated as an adult does not appear.
A name's share of births in one state is compared with its share nationally. The multiplier shown is not the raw ratio but the conservative low end of it — specifically the Poisson lower 95% bound, (observed − 1.96√observed) ÷ expected.
That matters more than it sounds. A name given to five babies where one was expected is also "five times more common", but five births is luck rather than culture. Subtracting the uncertainty first means a name carried by a handful of births cannot outrank one carried by hundreds, and no arbitrary minimum-count cutoff is needed.
Where a page estimates how many people with a name are alive, recorded births are carried forward through the SSA's 2023 period life table by age and sex. It is an estimate, not a count. A period table describes mortality in one recent year, so it credits older cohorts with today's survival rather than the harsher rates they actually lived through: the further back a name peaked, the more it overstates.
No name meanings copied from elsewhere. The origin notes that exist are written for this site; most names have none rather than a guess. An earlier version inferred meanings from spelling similarity and was wrong often enough to remove entirely.
About · Privacy · Contact
Source: U.S.A. Social Security Administration. Years 1880–2025. namelegacy.org