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For some reason in 2001, Osama named stopped being popular http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/index.html?Gend... Barak in 2008 became even more popular... Soon not so much :) http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/index.html?Gend...
Think that first blip on 1990 is related to the Neo Geo?
>Sorry, "Bort" is not in the boy's name database.

Outrageous.

Robert'); DROP Table Students; was also not in the database.
Peculiarly, there were dozens of instances of boys named Sue prior to Shel Silverstein writing "A Boy Named Sue", which makes me suspect that the song in question might very well have been a true story.

Curiously, the popularity of naming boys "Susan" [0] also peaked more than half a decade before the song was published. ("Sue", in contrast, peaked even earlier in the mid-40's, though it seems it made a comeback in the late-80's).

[0]: http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/index.html?Gend...

More interesting than it might first appear. If you try a name like 'Stanley' you can see the devastating effects of the war years. You also see a resurgence in the name 20 years or so later, I'd guess when people want to remember a parent or grandparent in their own child.
The increase of "Alexander" starting from the mid-80s looks really weird: http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/index.html?Gend...

It's easy to see why names such as "Buzz" have the curves that they have (space race), but it's hard to trace any event that influenced more common names. For example, check "Jacob", "Justin". Does anybody have an idea as to why these curves have this shape?

The Jacob and Justin rises correlate very well with the baby-boomer generation beginning to have children.

It's interesting to note that the increase in the use of Justin has a matching (if slightly lagging) increase in literature[1], while the increase in Jacob isn't[2].

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Justin&year_st...

[2] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Jacob&year_sta...

"Amy" is another interesting one, what influenced that? http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/index.html?Gend...

I just figured out that it shows a random one when you don't enter a query, that's cool.

Other spikes: Linda, Jordan, Mason, Deborah, Beth, Paige, Laurie, Chloe, Megan, Stella, Stacey, Kim

It seems like female names are much more likely to have sharp spikes in popularity verses male first names.

The spike starts before the show aired , but some of the popularity probably came from Family Ties:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Ties

Jeremiah (http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/index.html?Gend...) has an interesting rise in the 70s, but then disappears in the 80s (like so many things) but comes on strong again by the 2000s. The double humps doesn't seem to appear all that often, even clicking on the other examples in these HN comments, some of which appear to show spikes but are still normalish humps, not bimodal.
Heaven help us, but that might have been the Three Dog Night song "Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog."
What surprised me is that quite a few old-timey-sounding, probably-Biblical names ("Jebediah", "Ezekiel", "Jeremiah", "Abraham", "Noah") were either practically non-existent or otherwise rather unpopular 50 years (and further) back from the present.
http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/index.html?Gend...

Interestingly, "Buzz" seems to track events and anniversaries in the space race quite neatly. Toy Story had no impact.

Sooo... Are there many American girls named after a typical old-style italian macho name?

http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/index.html?Gend...

If by many you mean about 100: Apparently yes.
'Sorry, "Bort" is not in the boys name database.'
Ha! I got my own name when I first landed on the site. For a second there I thought the real story was that they'd somehow exploited a third party cookie but it appears to be a coincidence.
Wow, 'Ace' is really taking off- http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/index.html?Gend...

'Adolf' seems uniformly credited to just a few poor souls- http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/index.html?Gend...

I legally changed my name last year, so I have the fortune of having two sets of names to play with.

Here are my observations (note that I'm not actually posting my deadname here, but I'll still post my thoughts on it):

Old first name: My parents were spot on. I'm well within the typical age, and the median year was only four years off from my birth year. It had a very high spike in the 70s and 80s, and it's since gone down to 1970 levels and stayed there.

Old middle name: On the other hand, my parents gave me an old man's name. The age range starts at 47, and I'm 30. It peaked in the early '60s and was a curiosity by the time I was born.

New first name (Amy): I'm a little off here, but not by much. I'm only a year outside the typical range. When I was born, it had already been in decline for a few years, but it had far from bottomed out yet.

New middle name (Jessica): Spot on. Median age is only three years away from my actual birth year, and I was born really close to the peak. Oddly enough, when I was putting together my new name, I originally wanted Jessica to be my first name, but I ended up changing my mind and making it my middle name because I liked Amy better. Shame it crashed so hard in the last few years.

Actually, I'd say your parents were spot on with both your first and middle name, because middle names are usually picked in honor of someone in their or their parent's generation (usually a relative).

The other thing is for the "classiest" names (ie most fashionable) you want to be at the head of the trend not at the height of popularity as it's become "common" by then.

These should be normalized for the number of births per year.
Some strange looking mortality on low volume names, I used Irish names, Male-Darragh, Female-Clodagh. E.g Clodagh goes from 13 to 5.5 between 2009-2010
It says, "Sorry, Enindu is not in the boys names database".
Funny how the curve fits historical incidents. Searching for "Adolf" and the name gains in popularity in the 1910s and 1920s; dips in the 1930s as Nazism rises; and nosedives in the early 1940s as WWII kicks off. Interesting.

Contrarily, the name "Winston" jumps in the 1940s.

You don't think its as simple as people choosing one of the ten most popular names for a given year do you?

I found it exceedingly accurate with most of the people for a given first name I know being born plus or minus five years of the peak for that name in popularity.

I wish they wouldn't have curved/smoothed the graphs. Since it's by year, there are discrete points and values. When you curve a line it has implications for the underlying data, which in this case are incorrect.
Many of the common traditional english names drop off around 1995. Tried a few to find what's taking up the slack. Jack[1] was an unexpected one. Lots of J names in general, but few that pick up around 95.

[1] http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/index.html?Gend...

My parents were ahead of the curve, apparently.

~25 when I was born, ~750 and climbing now.

If only I had a trust fund that looked like the growth curve on my name popularity...

Travis peaked first in 1980 which was when the famous Levi's commercial first aired.

Would love to see someone correlate hit TV shows with popular names.

Much as I admire Randy Olson, there's been a much better version of this around for at least 10 years: Baby Name Voyager. http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager
This is cool. I used that same SSA data for a fun agency project for J&J about a year ago: http://hellomynamemeans.com/en/
Funny how Mael has won quite a lot of hype in the past years (it's still a rare name, sure, but it's much more common now than when I first ...acquired... it).
Has anyone used this to get inferred stats on a database of people's names? I'd be especially interested in applications for e-commerce analytics.
"The median living boy named Johnie was born around 1948 and ranges from 51 to 79 years old."

This is what happens when you're #4...

Looks like my mother was born in peak Suzie.

What do they say happens to those who don't label their axis? I've forgotten...

Welp, I knew my Igbo name wouldn't be in the boy's name database. :/
"Obama", "Britney"
Vernor is interesting :0)
Very accurate for mine!
Surprisingly accurate