Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Trends in Baby Names

For those that don't know, Polly spends quite a bit of her waking (and sleeping) hours thinking about names.  She reads name blogs, discusses names in online forums devoted to the subject and looks forward every year for the big holiday for names and the people who love them: Mother's Day. That's the day when the Social Security Administration releases their baby name statistics and name devotees can discuss trending topics in names.  

Sometimes Polly will ask me, apropos of nothing, whether I like name A or B more.  I am horrible at this game, since I can barely remember my own name, let alone other people names, and will answer A or B almost at random.  Then Polly will ask me 'why?' and I will mumble out an answer usually along the lines of 'I donno' or 'just cuz.' 

Sigh. I'm sure this is insanely frustrating, sort of like if someone didn't think 3-D printers or a $25 computer the size of a paperclip were inherently cool. To make it up to her I try to put my elite hacking skills ('findstr' and Excel) to use making some more nifty graphs which show the trending popularity of some specific names. 

Polly, I love you, here are some more graphs!


Polly is convinced that the name 'Brixton' will eventually be in the top 1000 names for boys (due to the similarity to Braxton and Paxton).   Thoughts?

7 comments:

grandma ann said...

Well, both are gaining, aren't they?
Some famous couple- forget who-just named their son Braxton???? or something like that. It was a "place" name.

grandma cindy said...

Visited both the doctor and the dentist today. Received raves over the "baby" necklace of Unity and Brixton that I wear every day at both places. I still get compliments on it almost daily. There was a new dental assistant and when Dr. Carla was asking about the grand kids, her new assistant piped in with "Their names are Unity and Brixton? That's sooooo cool!" I actually hear that a lot too. You did well picking out those special names for those very special kids!

oma said...

wow! that is LOVE! and those are some unique names. brixton's going to have to get a few more takers before he cracks that top 1,000.

Ben Bennett said...

I assume she has seen this?

http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager#prefix=bri&ms=false&exact=false

zelda said...

i wonder what the "zelda" or "zoren" graph would look like....

zelda said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
cdg said...

Baby Name Wizard has a web app which will graph names in the top 1000.

http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager