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How we collect, process, and present baby name data to ensure accuracy and reliability
All popularity data on BabyNameScout is derived from the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA), which has collected baby name data since 1880 and records the names of all babies who receive Social Security numbers. We use the SSA national file for a single birth year: 2020, the most recent year we have imported. Every rank shown anywhere on this site refers to births in 2020 — not to the current year.
The 2020 file we use lists 17,360 girl names and 13,911 boy names — every name given to at least 5 babies that year. Names below that threshold are withheld by the SSA to protect privacy. A name in our database with no 2020 SSA record therefore carries no rank at all: we show “no SSA rank available” rather than an estimate, because a guessed rank would be indistinguishable from a real one.
We use this data for popularity ranks because the underlying counts are a verifiable, government-maintained record of actual birth registrations rather than survey estimates. The ranks themselves are computed by us from those published counts (see below), and we ship the source file we used alongside the site code so the numbers can be checked.
We sort the SSA 2020 national file by birth count within each sex and assign rank 1 to the highest count, so a name ranked #1 was the most commonly given name to babies of that sex born in 2020. Ranks are unique within a sex: exactly one girl name is #1, one is #2, and so on. For a unisex name we report the rank in whichever cohort the name was given more often in 2020 and label which cohort that is.
We have imported one birth year of SSA data (2020), so we do not calculate movement between years. That means:
We currently import a single birth year (2020), so we do not publish computed year-over-year or 1880-present popularity curves. Where our written content describes a name as rising, falling or a steady classic, that is editorial commentary rather than a figure calculated from multi-year SSA data.
Unlike the popularity ranks, which are computed from one government dataset, the meaning and origin fields are editorial content. Here is what that does and does not mean:
The origin label on each name (Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Old English and so on) is an editorial classification written by our team from widely available reference material. It is not the output of a licensed etymological database or an original philological study, and for names with contested histories it reflects the attribution in common use.
Meanings are short editorial glosses, not sourced citations: we present the interpretation in common use, and we do not claim a scholarly apparatus behind each entry. Many names have several defensible readings, and some widely repeated meanings are folk etymologies. Please treat these fields as a starting point for your own reading.
Each name is classified by its primary cultural origin. For names with complex histories that span multiple cultures, we identify the earliest documented origin and note subsequent cultural adoptions. For example, a name that originated in Hebrew but was adopted into Greek and then English is classified as Hebrew in origin, with its Greek and English forms noted.
We research the cultural significance of names within their communities of origin, including any religious associations, historical figures who bore the name, literary references, and traditional naming customs. This context helps parents understand not just what a name means, but the cultural heritage it represents.
Our sibling name matching algorithm considers multiple factors to suggest names that complement each other:
Currently derived from the SSA 2020 birth-year file; they change only when we import a newer SSA year
Editorial content; corrected when a reader or our team spots an error
Added monthly based on emerging trends and reader requests
Editorial commentary; we do not compute multi-year trends from SSA data today
Current Data: SSA national birth-name counts for birth year 2020 (the newest year imported; SSA has published later years that we have not yet processed) | Database: 1,501 names, 1,500 with a 2020 SSA rank | Origins: 30+ cultures
We believe in transparency about the limitations of our data:
Browse 1,500+ baby names with editorial meanings and origins, plus popularity ranks derived from SSA birth counts for 2020.