Popular Human Names

Mom thinks names are interesting, for some reason, so she likes to find out what the popular names are that everybody is naming their babies.  I think dog and cat names are much more interesting, but I already wrote about that topic.  So when Mom said maybe I should write about popular human baby names, I said okay.  And actually, this subject is sort of related to dogs because a lot of dogs end up with people names, not to mention living in houses with people, some of whom have popular names.

Anyway, Mom's favorite website for looking at baby names is the Social Security site, which you can find here:  http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/index.html   On this site, you can really waste a lot of time looking up names to see how popular they were in certain years, going all the way back to 1880.  Or you can look up a certain year to see what names were the most popular in that year.

I will tell you some examples of stuff you can find on this website, starting with the most popular names for 2009, which was just last year.  The names for 2010 aren't on the site yet because of course 2010 isn't finished yet.  So here are the top 20 most popular boys' names:

  1.  Jacob

  2.  Ethan

  3.  Michael

  4.  Alexander

  5.  William

  6.  Joshua

  7.  Daniel

  8.  Jayden

  9.  Noah

10.  Anthony

11.  Christopher

12.  Aiden

13.  Matthew

14.  David

15.  Andrew

16.  Joseph

17.  Logan

18.  James

19.  Ryan

20.  Benjamin

And here are the most popular girls' names:

  1.  Isabella

  2.  Emma

  3.  Olivia

  4.  Sophia

  5.  Ava

  6.  Emily

  7.  Madison

  8.  Abigail

  9.  Chloe

10.  Mia

11.  Elizabeth

12.  Addison

13.  Alexis

14.  Ella

15.  Samantha

16.  Natalie

17.  Grace

18.  Lily

19.  Alyssa

20.  Ashley

Mom and I were surprised to see that Isabella is now the #1 girl's name, because Emma has been #1 for a while.  And also Ethan is now more popular than Michael, which was the #1 name for several years.  And another thing that's interesting is that many of these very most popular names are what you might call "old-fashioned" names that were popular in the late 1800s.  Which just goes to prove that "what goes around, comes around."

Anyway, just to compare, here are the top 20 boys' names from 1880:

  1.  John
  2.  William
  3.  James
  4.  Charles
  5.  George
  6.  Frank
  7.  Joseph
  8.  Thomas
  9.  Henry
10.  Robert
11.  Edward
12.  Harry
13.  Walter
14.  Arthur
15.  Fred
16.  Albert
17.  Samuel
18.  David
19.  Louis
20.  Joe

And the names for girls:

  1.  Mary
  2.  Anna
  3.  Emma
  4.  Elizabeth
  5.  Minnie
  6.  Margaret
  7.  Ida
  8.  Alice
  9.  Bertha
10.  Sarah
11.  Annie
12.  Clara
13.  Ella
14.  Florence
15.  Cora
16.  Martha
17.  Laura
18.  Nellie
19.  Grace
20.  Carrie

Well, of course, I was interested in the name Piper, since it is such a special name, so I did a search on it. And what I learned was that my name was not even on the chart before 2000, which means it was not in the top 999 names.  But when it suddenly showed up in 2000, it was #509 on the list, and by 2009 it was all the way up to #147.  So this means my name is getting to be really popular really fast!

Okay, so I also checked out Mom's name, which is Eva.  This is an old name that goes way back, like all the way back to the first woman ever created, according to the Bible.  I guess this means that in the year of the Creation, Eva (or Eve) was the most popular of all girls' names, but the Social Security website doesn't go back that far.  Anyway, Eva is one of those old-fashioned names that is getting to be more popular again.  In 2009, it was #99, and that was up from #294 in 2000.  And Ava, which is really just another version of Eva, has been in the top 10 for several years now.  The most popular year for the name Eva turns out to have been 1889, when it was #31, but during most of that decade it was ranked somewhere in the 30s.

Maybe you were also wondering what people are naming their twins, and so now I will tell you just a few of the most popular pairs of twin names.  Here are the girls:

  1.  Isabella, Sophia
  2.  Faith, Hope
  3.  Olivia, Sophia
  4.  Ella, Emma
  5.  Hailey, Hannah
  6.  Ava, Emma
  7.  Heaven, Nevaeh
  8.  Madison, Morgan
  9.  Mackenzie, Madison
10.  Ava, Olivia

And the boys:

  1.  Jacob, Joshua
  2.  Matthew, Michael
  3.  Daniel, David
  4.  Jayden, Jordan
  5.  Jayden, Jaylen
  6.  Elijah, Isaiah
  7.  Isaac, Isaiah
  8.  Ethan, Evan
  9.  Logan, Lucas
10.  Logan, Luke

And for boy/girl twins:

  1.  Madison, Mason
  2.  Taylor, Tyler
  3.  Addison, Aiden
  4.  Emily, Ethan
  5.  Emma, Evan
  6.  Ella, Ethan
  7.  Emma, Ethan
  8.  Jayda, Jayden
  9.  Jada, Jaden
10.  Aidan, Nadia

So that's a whole bunch of stuff about human baby names that maybe you didn't even want to know, and if you didn't, I hope you already quit reading.  But if you think this kind of thing is interesting, like my mom does, you can go to that website I told you about, and you can look up your own name to see how popular it is or was.  And if you are going to have a baby, you can get a bunch of ideas for names.  Or you might even find some names for the next pets you adopt.