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:
- all-names.csv, as well as boys.csv and girls.csv
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Baby books are outdated.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 :star2: 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 :rocket:
PayPal— You can make one-time donations to dxdc via PayPal.- Venmo— You can make one-time donations via Venmo.
- Bitcoin— You can send me Bitcoin at this address:
33sT6xw3tZWAdP2oL4ygbH5TVpVMfk9VW7