About NamePlayground

Where the data comes from

Every count, rank, and chart on this site is derived from the U.S. Social Security Administration's national baby name files, published annually and covering births from 1880 to 2025. The dataset currently spans 105,966 distinct names and 375,362,447 recorded births.

The SSA counts names from Social Security card applications. A few quirks worth knowing:

The 5-baby rule. To protect privacy, the SSA only publishes a name for a given year and gender if at least 5 babies received it. A name showing zero births in a year may simply have fallen below that threshold rather than vanished entirely.

Early years undercount. Social Security began in 1935, so data before then comes from people who applied later in life. Counts from the 1880s through the 1910s skew low, especially for people who died young.

Exact spellings only. The SSA treats every spelling as its own name — Sophia and Sofia are separate entries. That is why our spelling remix tool exists.

How we compute things

Ranks are per year, per gender, by birth count. Trends compare a name's latest rank against its rank five years earlier. Peak year is the year with the most births for that name and gender. Gender lean calls a name girl or boy when at least 80% of its all-time births are one gender; otherwise we call it unisex. Syllables are estimated from vowel groups and are occasionally wrong for tricky names — English is like that.

Meanings and origins are editorial additions for well-known names and are not part of the SSA dataset.

The fine print

NamePlayground is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Social Security Administration. The underlying data is public domain; our presentation, design, and derived statistics are © NamePlayground. Found a bug or a name behaving oddly? We would love to hear about it.