Baby names

Each year in May (around Mother's Day!) the U.S. Social Security Administration releases statistical data on the previous year's crop of baby names. We studied this data intently when naming our children, seeking to avoid names that would be "too popular." (We also used the NameVoyager, a graphical interface of the SSA data.)

None of the three names we seriously considered for Laurel could have been considered popular in an absolute* sense. In 2009, the year our baby girl was born, "Alice" was #258, "Margaret" was #187, and "Laurel" was ... well, in 2009 it wasn't in the top 1,000 at all, but it was #983 in 2008.

"Isaac," on the other hand, is a popular name. In fact, throughout my pregnancy with him in 2005, we worried that it was too popular -- worse, our instincts told us that it was due to become even more popular. I last blogged about this worry in 2007; at that time, the name Isaac had been holding steady at about #50 in the U.S. and #30 in California.

So have our worries been realized? What did the release of the 2009 data reveal? In the U.S., Isaac rose to #40, and in California, Isaac leaped to #20. Twenty! That's too popular, isn't it?

Fortunately, even though the name is getting more popular every year, I still don't know any other little Isaacs.

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* Although "Alice" isn't technically a popular name, we worried that it was going to experience a leap in popularity that would quickly make it seem outdated, a trend whose time has passed. And this seems to be happening:

2009	258
2008	327
2007	347
2006	384
2005	414
2004	403
2003	431
2002	444
2001	439
2000	422

Then again, it was #10 in the 1880s.