Data sources

Every puzzle, year page and name page on NameYear is built from one public dataset.

Name data: U.S. Social Security Administration, “Baby Names from Social Security Card Applications” (national data 1880–2025 and state data 1910–2025), published on data.gov under CC0 1.0. Only names with at least 5 births in a given year and sex are included, and counts before 1937 are incomplete. NameYear is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Social Security Administration.

Sources

• Baby Names from Social Security Card Applications – National Data · data.gov catalog
• Baby Names from Social Security Card Applications – State and District of Columbia Data · data.gov catalog
• Background information and limitations · Social Security Administration

What we use

National data available

1880–2025

Years used on this site

1925–2025

Puzzle answer years

1935–2025

State data

Used only for the state lists on name pages

Popularity on this site means a name’s share of the births listed in the files for that year and sex. Because names with fewer than 5 births are left out of the files, those shares are slightly higher than they would be against every U.S. birth. Rankings follow the same rule: one spelling, one sex, one year.

The Guess my group tool downloads yearly birth counts for every name with at least 100 U.S. births since 1925, grouped into small files by the first two letters of the name. The math runs in your browser.

Known limits

• Names with fewer than 5 births in a year, for a given sex, are not in the data.
• Counts before 1937 are incomplete, because many people born earlier never applied for a Social Security card.
• Only births in the United States are included.
• Each spelling is a separate name, and sex is recorded as female or male.

More on what that means for the game is on the About page.

Updates

The SSA usually publishes a new year of data each spring. When it does, we rebuild the year and name pages. Puzzles that have already gone live stay exactly as they were.

File checksums

SHA-256 hashes of the SSA files the current data was built from:

• names.zip cd78e975ed7bb358e018dd62fbe14ced89295e9581c49172ca4eedcb011b3724
• namesbystate.zip e8aaf58e3838ec2a2aa880635014744ba20f74941a2688ac36723acaf604d66a

Spotted a number that looks wrong? Email hello@nameyear.com.