Where Our Data Comes From
Every popularity figure on this site comes from a national register of births, and our pronunciation data from a published dictionary. This page lists each source, its licence, and the attribution that licence requires.
We publish no popularity figure we can't attribute to an official register of births. Name meanings and etymology are written by us; the numbers aren't ours, and this page says whose they are.
What the Figures Do and Do Not Include
Every source withholds its rarest names, and the threshold differs. The United States omits any name given to fewer than five babies in a year; the British and Irish offices withhold anything under three. A name missing from a year is therefore below the threshold, not unused, and we never present absence as zero.
France is a further case: INSEE rounds every count to the nearest five, so no French figure on this site is exact, and we don't present one as though it were.
Canada publishes its names without accents. Not one name in the Statistics Canada table carries a non-ASCII character, so a Canadian figure for Chloe covers Chloe and Chloé together, and no Canadian figure can separate an accented spelling from its plain one. That's a limit of the source, not a choice of ours, and it's why a Québécois name can look flatter in Canada than it really is.
One further Canadian caveat: Quebec's rows in that table are drawn from Retraite Québec, which records children eligible for family benefits, rather than from the vital-statistics birth register used for the rest of the country. It's one published series carrying two different denominators, and Statistics Canada says so.
There is no single United Kingdom series. England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland each publish separately, on their own timetables, so we report them as three markets and never add them together into a "UK" number that no statistics office produces.
Carnegie Mellon University
Public domain (BSD-style, free for any use)- CMU Pronouncing Dictionary
Central Statistics Office, Ireland
CC BY 4.0Source: Central Statistics Office, Ireland, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- Boys names in Ireland — 1964 onwards
- Girls names in Ireland — 1964 onwards
Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE)
Licence Ouverte / Open Licence 2.0 (Etalab)Source: INSEE, Fichier des prénoms, updated June 2025, licensed under the Licence Ouverte / Open Licence 2.0.
- Fichier des prénoms, France — 1900–2025
Visit Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE)
National Records of Scotland
Open Government Licence v3.0Source: National Records of Scotland, © Crown copyright, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
- Babies' first names, Scotland — 1974–2024
Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency
Open Government Licence v3.0Source: NISRA, © Crown copyright, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
- First forenames given to babies, Northern Ireland — 1997–2024
Office for National Statistics
Open Government Licence v3.0Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
- Baby names in England and Wales — 1996 onwards
- Baby names in England and Wales: from 1996 — 1996–2025
Statistics Canada
Statistics Canada Open LicenceSource: Statistics Canada, Table 17-10-0147-01, First names at birth by sex at birth. Reproduced and distributed on an "as is" basis with the permission of Statistics Canada.
- First names at birth by sex at birth, Canada — 1991–2024
United States Social Security Administration
Public domain (US Government work)Source: US Social Security Administration.
- SSA national baby names by year of birth — 1880 onwards
- SSA baby names by state and year of birth — 1910 onwards
Used to Verify, Not to Supply
No numbers on this site come from these. They are the references a claim is checked against before it is published — and their licences ask to be named.
Wikimedia Foundation
CC BY-SA 4.0Nickname relationships verified against the English Wiktionary (en.wiktionary.org), CC BY-SA 4.0.
Used only to CONFIRM authored nickname links (Tier 3). No definitions or prose are stored or published.
Corrections
If a figure here disagrees with the source it cites, the source is right and we want to know. Every number on this site is reproducible from the files listed above.