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📈 Culture

Name trends

How names move in time — SSA, ONS and Statistics Korea as dated frequency files, not as a live global leaderboard.

Name trends are one of the cleanest cultural time series we have, because births are registered. The U.S. Social Security Administration’s published given-name files from 1880 are the most famous graph.

The Office for National Statistics (England and Wales) and Statistics Korea publish their own counts. Each is a jurisdiction and a year — not a world cup of names.

This page teaches you to read those files the way Lieberson did: as taste cycles. It will not announce a current global number-one, because no such official exists.

U.S. fileSSA from 1880
England & WalesONS releases
KoreaStatistics Korea
TheoryLieberson taste
RuleAlways cite a year
ForbiddenInvented live #1

Profile

Identity weight
60
Trend volatility
96
Legal friction
20
Cultural depth
55
Practical difficulty
42
Everyday reach
75

Seven chapters

History

How governments accidentally built the best fashion dataset in onomastics.

Read →

Science

How to read a frequency file without lying with it.

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Craft

Using trend data as a citizen without becoming a tipster.

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Culture

The culture of crowning a name — newspapers, pools and mockery.

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Trends

Trend-watching is itself trending — which raises the duty to cite.

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Voices

The people and offices who made name fashion measurable.

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Worldwide

Every country that registers births can have a trend file. Few have a world file.

Read →

Frequently asked questions

What is the SSA baby-name file?
A U.S. compilation of given-name frequencies based on Social Security card applications, published from 1880 onward with a lag. It is a historical series, not a crystal ball.
Does ONS cover the whole UK?
The well-known baby-name release is for England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate publications. Say which office.
What does Statistics Korea publish?
Annual given-name frequency information that researchers use to watch Korean naming fashion, including shifts between Sino-Korean and native Korean names in dated years.
Why do names rise and fall together?
Lieberson’s A Matter of Taste: parents want distinction inside a style, so endings and neighbours move as clusters.
Can I say what last year’s #1 was?
Only if you cite the office and the year after that office has published. Do not invent a live #1 in this atlas’s voice.
Do celebrities cause the waves?
Sometimes they spike a name (see celebrity-influence). Lieberson argued they are over-credited relative to internal fashion.
Are surname trends as fast?
No. Surnames move with migration and law. Given names are the volatile series.
Is a rising name a good name?
It is a fashionable name in that file-year. Quality is a different page.

Open the name lab →