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Wednesday, January 23, 2008

The Baby Name Wizard NameVoyager

Have you tried the Baby Name Wizard NameVoyager tool at http://www.babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html? It's interesting to see how name popularity has grown and ebbed over the years. For instance, my name, Randall, was popular in the 1950s and 1960s, but has ebbed since 1980 -

1930's -- 316th most popular
1940's -- 132nd most popular
1950's -- 58th most popular
1960's -- 65th most popular
1970's -- 122nd most popular
1980's -- 148th most popular
1990's -- 270th most popular
2006 -- 622nd most popular

This NameVoyager tool FAQs notes that

"NameVoyager shows name usage figures from 1880 through 2005 for the top 1000 most common names. The last three years (2003, 2004, 2005) are shown individually. Prior years are shown by decade. The original information was obtained from the Social Security Administration.

"Names are listed alphabetically. As you enter a name you can see the thickness of the band in relation to other names, thus showing how common that name was used in a time period. The database is configured according to the frequency of use, not popularity."

I recommend that you put in only the first 3 or 4 letters of a given name and you can see all the variations.

The current Top 25 baby names are listed here.

There is a book by Laura Wattenburg called "The Baby Name Wizard" available here.

This is an interesting site - I really like the graphs they make! This is a cool time-waster, eh?

1 comment:

  1. Check out the Baby Name Map for more up-to-date stats from the Social Security Administration as well as data from outside the US.

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