Frequently Asked Questions

NameAlmanac tracks 105,966 unique name spellings (117,820 name-and-sex records) recorded in the United States from 1880 through 2025, spanning 146 years of Social Security Administration birth records.

All data comes from the Social Security Administration's public baby name dataset, which is derived from Social Security card applications. It is the most comprehensive public record of given names in the United States, updated annually.

The SSA excludes names with fewer than 5 occurrences in any given year to protect individual privacy. If a name is very rare, it may not appear in search results. Additionally, names not registered with the SSA (e.g., non-citizens who never applied) are not in the dataset.

Our data runs through 2025. The SSA publishes new data annually, typically in the spring. We update NameAlmanac within a few weeks of each new SSA release.

Rankings are based on total births per year for each gender. Rank 1 is the most-given name for that gender that year. Ties are broken alphabetically. We also show percentage-of-births charts, which normalize for population growth and let you compare true popularity across different eras.

Yes. Each name's page shows a trend chart from 1880 to 2025 displaying either total births or percentage of all births per year. You can see exactly when a name peaked, declined, or made a comeback.

No. NameAlmanac is based exclusively on SSA data, which covers the United States only. We don't have data on naming trends in other countries.