A collection of names of each gender that were products of a decade. Names were pulled based on popularity and degree to which a name's share of births fell within a particular decade. Names of each gender are colored by the decade in which they achieved their highest popularity, so, e.g., Todd and Tammy were both peaking in the 1960s, while Chad and Jennifer peaked in the 1970s.

Note: The axes for the two genders are on different scales because Jennifer was so wildly popular in the 70s and early 80s. Who knew?

Data Source: Social Security Administration Popular Baby Names (link)

Tool: Produced using R (ggplot2)

Posted by socjones

39 comments

  3. Wow, I can connect like 5 family member names to the decades they were born. We’re not very original.

  5. Data that is interesting and beautiful? Feels like I’m on the wrong sub 😅

    Congrats OP

  7. Thank God Aiden is on the downslope. Our nightmare is over.

  8. erm where is michael? I guess they just removed that entirely because it’d screw up the boy’s data for decades?

  9. Joseph has never been the most popular name, but hasn’t dropped out of the top 10 ever.

    We’re the Dewalt Tools brand of names.
    Never the best. Never the most popular. But always there hammering and screwing.

  11. Feel like the 70s gave us way more Christopher’s than Chad and Todd.

    Interesting that girls names seem to spike way more than boys names do.

  12. Nice! I messed around with this dataset when I was first learning R, never thought to group by decade. Diggin it.

  13. This explains why everybody I know has an Uncle Larry and Aunt Debbie

  14. Neat. But what is this data? Why were these popular names picked for the chart, and not say Dylan or Taylor? You are reporting that more parents named their children after Brittany Spears than Taylor Swift?

  15. All I’m taking from this is that Karen hasn’t even begun to peak.

  16. Where tf is Christopher? I know more Chris’s than any other name, by a weird margin

  17. Hmm, for their popularity I know very few people named any of those.

    I know one Bruce, one Todd, one Cody, one Debra (not spelled that way), one Jennifer, two Amandas, one Brittany, and none of the others, out of the several thousand people I’ve ever known and met.

  18. Where is Michael? It was the most popular name for like 2.5 decades.

  19. Boomers reeeeally liked naming their daughters Jennifer. 

  20. I associate each of these names with the period about two decades after they peaked in popularity.

  21. The only thing keeping Katelynn off this chart for the 90s is that people spelled it 9 different ways. I swear there were at least 6 variations of it in my graduating class of ~400.

  22. Where is the name Matthew? I feel like it was the most popular name for a while. I guess maybe it could be split between 80s and 90s, causing it to not be the most popular in a given decade.

  23. I know a Larry, a Brittany, and a Sophia that were born during the peaks of their names.

  24. You definitely need to follow up with a chart of the most popular names of the last 100-ish years

  26. Could we get a “where” in the title? Had to work way too hard to confirm this is US data. 

  28. No I knew about Jennifer.

    Why does the male names list look like a list of guys you know to avoid?

  29. I know a couple with a pair of names that match each other in popularity and can confirm the decade they were born matches!

  30. I keep saying that Jennanmathan is actually a beautiful name.

  31. Crazy. As someone born in 1984, I don’t think I know a single Dustin.

  32. I feel like if you could somehow combine all the names with alternate spellings (like Ashley, Ashlee, Ashleigh, etc) it would make for different results!

  33. As a John who was born in 1961, I can unequivocally state that due to John F Kennedy’s popularity, every school classroom I was in had somewhere between 3-5 boys named John.

    Not the whole grade, each classroom!!

  36. Why was the name Jennifer so popular for so long? Why is it so much more so than all the other names, I wonder?

  37. Interesting that (what I would think of as) shortened forms are so prevalent – Larry for Lawrence, Tammy for Tamara or Tamsin, etc. Were people actually naming their kid “Larry” or is there some kind of grouping/shortening?

  38. As an Oliver born in the late 00s, I can’t go a single fucking day now without hearing my name being called to every little white boy and I think it’s slowly driving me insane. Also, who knew there were that many Larry’s being born in the 40s, that’s gotta be like 20% of all kids or something back then.

  39. Based on how many Michaels and Matthews there were when I was growing up, I’m shocked neither was ever the most popular.

    Also what if we combined all the Kates and Kaitlyns and all the different spellings of Caitlyn? That would dominate

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