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baby names

This project was designed as a tool to help parents find names for their newborns.

With this list: Jonathan, Johnathan, Johnathon, Jonothan, Jonathon are now just considered alternative spellings for a single "name".

Using publicly-available datasets from the United States Social Security Administration, lists of baby names between the years of 1880 and 2021 were collated, de-duplicated by phonetic pronunciation using the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, and then ordered by popularity.

How to Use

The source code for this project is included, as are the compiled datasets:

You can also view an abbreviated version of this list online.

Recommendation: Review this list in order from top to bottom, applying any filters you wish (e.g., using Excel).

The following columns are provided:

Header Description
rank Popularity index (1880 - 2021)
name Baby name
alt_spellings A list of alternative spellings, separated by spaces
n_sum Total number of babies born in the United States with this name (includes alternate spellings)
n_percent Cumulative percentage of babies born with this name (includes higher rows)
year_min Year this name was first used
year_max Year this name was last used
year_pop Most popular year for this name
biblical Biblical name
palindrome Palindrome
phones Deduplicated list of phonetic phonemes
first_letter First letter of the name
stresses Lexical stress pattern
syllables Number of syllables
alliteration_first Name contains alliteration (1 = any, 2 = with first letter)
unisex Unisex determined arbitrarily using a cut-off of 15,000 minimum babies born to each gender and used since 1970

Observations

Reviewing a few thousand names is probably sufficient to find one that is relatively "normal", and encompasses 90-95% of the most common names. Unless you happen to be looking for a highly unique or specific name, that is a very reasonable number of options for review.

About

Baby books are outdated. Mostly, they consist of name lists that expectant parents need to review with little or no context / direction. That is highly inefficient.

Topics like:

  • Name popularity
  • Alternative spellings
  • Biblical names
  • Number of syllables
  • Starting letters
  • Old-fashioned names
  • Unisex names

and more, are not considered.

Furthermore, the datasets these baby books are using don't necessarily reflect reality, and reviewing similar lists of names from different resources multiple times is a waste of time.

No helpful resources could be identified, so this project was created.

Datasets

This package uses two datasets (see src/data):

  • babynames: For each year from 1880 to 2021 the number of children of each sex given each name. All names with more than 5 uses are given. (Source: http://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/limits.html)

  • biblical_names: A collection of de-duplicated biblical names collected from the web.

How to contribute

Have an idea? Found a bug? Contributions and pull requests are welcome.

Credits

A huge thank you to our little 🌟 who is the inspiration behind this repository.

Support this project

I try to reply to everyone needing help using these projects. Obviously, this takes time. However, if you get some profit from this or just want to encourage me to continue creating stuff, there are few ways you can do it:

  • Starring and sharing the projects you like 🚀
  • PayPal PayPal— You can make one-time donations to dxdc via PayPal.
  • Venmo— You can make one-time donations via Venmo. Venmo QR Code
  • Bitcoin— You can send me Bitcoin at this address: 33sT6xw3tZWAdP2oL4ygbH5TVpVMfk9VW7