Baby Name Wizard!

[juldea]

I agree with karlean7: the Baby Name Wizard is awesome. I wasted a good half an hour looking up names. :) It charts the popularity of names over the past 100+ years...

http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Very cool.

and it reminds me that people are INSANE right now. Why is Mikayla a more common name than Mike? (just for example)

And it graphically shows what i've been saying about the explosion of Alex-clones lately. Sigh.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Yes, in fact, if you add up all the Alex-variants, you do in fact get the most common name for 2003. GRR.

[juldea.livejournal.com]

Because Mike is generally just a shortened form of Michael, not a name itself?

Yeah. Lotsa Alexen.

[oddharmonic.livejournal.com]

My sister gave me grief for naming my kid Laurel. At least she won't have to spell her name every time she gives it out like the Mikkalas, Kortnees and Rylees I went to school with.

[mr-teem.livejournal.com]

Hurm. My birthname is most of a percentage point. But as Teem, I am relatively unique.

[mr-teem.livejournal.com]

Hurm. Although it was thirteenth in that decade.

Coincidence? I think not.

[oakleaf-mirror.livejournal.com]

It doesn't even have my name, oddly enough. I feel slighted!

(Actually, I would have been shocked if it did. It only has the top 1000 names from each decade, and presumably in the US.)

[juldea.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I wouldn't have expected yours to pop up... but then again, I didn't expect anitra, and it did! (but only in the 70s)

[anitra.livejournal.com]

HAHAHA...

I didn't see that the first time around (just figured they wouldn't have it.)

The scary thing is, I can tell you why it suddenly became so "popular" at that point. One of "Barker's Beauties" on The Price Is Right (in the 70's) was named Anitra.

Based on my lazy research, I would guess that about 1/2 of the Anitras (and variants such as Aneetra) out there were named because of that one woman on TV. About another 1/3 are named for the piece of music "Anitra's Dance" (like me), and the parents of the remaining 1/6 just made it up (this is where the majority of the weird spellings come from.)

[juldea.livejournal.com]

random aside - it is a dream of mine to be on The Price Is Right. I watched it too much as a child.

[pikajew.livejournal.com]

wifey, join the club;)

[juldea.livejournal.com]

Where does this information come from?
The NameVoyager tracks names of babies born in the Unites States, as reported by the Social Security Administration (SSA)

[oakleaf-mirror.livejournal.com]

That's what I suspected. They probably are using the US Census data, though, since the SSA didn't exist until the 1930s.