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Quick answers
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.
A rank is a position in a finite list for one sex category (as published) in one jurisdiction in one year. Change any of those and the “trend” changes.
Shares matter more than ranks when the long tail is growing: being #1 with 1% is not being #1 with 5%.
Findings
- Lieberson — Internal fashion dynamics
Endings, imitation and peak avoidance explain much of the SSA-shaped curves.
- Social Security Administration — Mary’s long band
Mary was the most frequent U.S. girls’ name in many years from 1880 through 1961 — a documented historical band.
- Office for National Statistics — 2010s leaders
Oliver and Olivia appear among frequent England-and-Wales leaders in several 2010s releases — cite those years.
- Statistics Korea — Mix cycles
Researchers use official Korean frequencies to describe dated shifts — not a live global crown.
- Fryer & Levitt — Group-specific trends
Subpopulation distinctiveness can move differently from the national head of the chart.
- Bertrand & Mullainathan — Trends ≠ fairness
A name can be trendy and still be stereotyped. Fashion files do not measure callbacks.
Mechanisms
- Registration lag — You see last completed year, not this morning’s births.
- Sex-category publishing — Most offices split lists; unisex stories need extra work (see gender-and-names).
- Thresholds — SSA suppresses very rare names — the tail is partly hidden.
- Media feedback — A published #1 can accelerate copying or avoidance the next year.
Debates
- Should offices publish ranks at all? — They feed anxiety and also enable science. Methodology notes are the compromise.
- National vs. ethnic files — A national #1 can hide opposite trends in subgroups.
- Are apps “live enough”? — Not for this atlas. If it lacks an office and a year, it is entertainment.
If you cannot name the office, the year and the denominator, you are not citing a trend. You are vibing.