Does anyone have a link or information on the actual numbers of children with any given name now versus the 70s or 80s? I’m interested in how many, say, Sophias were born in the past few years and how that compares with, say, Jennifers in the 70s. I’ve read that there are quite a few less of any one name nowadays, but i can’t seem to find any actual stats to back that assertion up.
Thanks!
You should probably check out babynamesworld.parentsconnect.com. It’s a name database but it also has all the SSA statistics going all the way back to when it was started in 1880. When you get there, you can say which year you want to know for the statistics, and if it’s a less popular name, you might have to scroll through a few pages to get to it, but, with [name]Jennifer[/name]'s popularity in the 70s/80s and [name]Sophia[/name]'s popularity now, you probably won’t have to scroll, haha, if that’s all you’re looking for. There’s an option at the top of the page to select which gender you’re looking for and which year, but other than that, it’s pretty easy to navigate. The only downfall about the site is that you can’t compare the exact number of babies born from the name profiles themselves, but you can scroll through the SSA data and find what you’re looking for pretty easily.
I think there’s also a way to get that info from the SSA website, but I’m not quite sure how to do that. @mischa usually posts information like that, so maybe PM her and ask her how she gets it? Or maybe just hope that she replies–she generally posts quite a bit.
Good luck!
About mid page there is a section titled “Popular Names by Birth year” you can selecet the top however many names you want, then you can click the option for total number of births. Hopefully this helps!
If you search the SSA lists at the link the PP provided, and select to show either the numbers or percentages of babies given each name (the latter is probably better as it avoids introducing the variable of how many total babies are born) you’ll definitely see that fewer babies are given a top name than back then. In fact, today’s #1 names are about as common as a name ranked in the teens 30 years ago.