The Social Security website has a pretty cool feature that shows you popular baby names for each year. It also has another cool feature that shows you how particular names have changed over time. Different names fluctuate in popularity over the years.

For example, when I was born, back in 1981, Alexander was the 70th most popular name for boys born that year. It is pretty damn cool to see how that has changed in the years since. For 2009 it is the 4th most popular name! Wow! Obviously I did much to popularize the name.

Since I’m a bit of a geek, I put the information into a graph:

It grew in popularity every single year from 1981 to 1993. Then held flat at 20-22nd through the rest of the 90’s. Then in 2001 is started to climb even further till finally, last year, peaking at the 4th most popular name in America! I’m such a trend setter! Here is the raw data:

1981 - 70th
1982 - 65th
1983 - 63rd
1984 - 54th
1985 - 50th
1986 - 41st
1987 - 37th
1988 - 34th
1989 - 32nd
1990 - 28th
1991 - 26th
1992 - 23rd
1993 - 21st
1994 - 22nd
1995 - 21st
1996 - 22nd
1997 - 22nd
1998 - 22nd
1999 - 21st
2000 - 20th
2001 - 20th
2002 - 15th
2003 - 16th
2004 - 15th
2005 - 12th
2006 - 12th
2007 - 11th
2008 - 6th
2009 - 4th

Check this link to track your own name.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at 5:53 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.