About babynames.io

What This Site Is

A free reference for baby names, built on the birth records national statistics offices publish every year. Not a list somebody typed up: 3,666,938 rows of official data covering 1880 to 2025, which is what lets a page tell you when a name peaked, whether it's rising or fading, and how many children actually have it.

Everything for reading and browsing is free and needs no account, and there is no advertising anywhere on the site.

Where the Numbers Come From

Each country's own statistics office, used under its published licence. Every one is named on Data Sources along with its licence and its known limitations — including the ones that matter, like the American records omitting any name given to fewer than five children in a year.

• Carnegie Mellon University — Public domain (BSD-style, free for any use)
• Central Statistics Office, Ireland — CC BY 4.0
• Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE) — Licence Ouverte / Open Licence 2.0 (Etalab)
• National Records of Scotland — Open Government Licence v3.0
• Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency — Open Government Licence v3.0
• Office for National Statistics — Open Government Licence v3.0
• Statistics Canada — Statistics Canada Open Licence
• United States Social Security Administration — Public domain (US Government work)

We keep the countries separate rather than merging them into one league table. A name can be top twenty in Ireland and outside the top three hundred in America, and flattening that into a single figure throws away the most useful thing in the data. When you ask for English-Speaking Countries, the ranking is built from combined births across all of them — not from whichever country happens to rate the name highest, which would let a name given to three children read as popular.

How the Writing Is Checked

2,289 names have an original written page covering their history, their meaning and how they have moved over time. Those are researched and written by hand, then put through automated checks before anything is published:

• every number in the prose is compared against the underlying records, and the page is held back if they disagree;
• claims about a name's history are checked against independent reference sources;
• a page that says something our own data contradicts is rejected, not published with a caveat.

Where sources genuinely disagree about a name's origin — which happens more often than most sites admit — we say so on the page, name each source and explain why they differ. Recently coined names in particular attract meanings invented after the fact, and pretending otherwise would be easier and less honest.

Names without a written page still carry everything the records can tell you: rank, trend, peak year, how many children were given the name and how that has changed. Nothing is generated to fill a gap. If we don't know something, the page doesn't say it.

What You Can Do Here

• Swipe & Match — go through names fast and keep the ones you like, on your own or with your partner. Only names you have both kept ever show as a match, and neither of you sees what the other passed on.
• The name generator — suggestions built around your surname, your other children's names, or names you already love.
• Name of the Day, and every name's own page with its full history.

Corrections

If something looks wrong, please tell us — it's the message we most want to receive. Statistics offices revise their own data and etymology is frequently contested, so corrections get read and acted on. Use the contact form or write to [email protected].

See also Data Sources, Privacy and Terms.