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We thought it would be fascinating to see
a list of the most popular names of
the last century, from 1900 to 1999.
So we created our “Top
100 Baby Names of The 20th Century” page. The list was compiled
from Social Security Administration
data. Our methodology is the same as
that used by the SSA in their calculations
of “top
names by decade.” The top-ranked name is the name occuring
most often over the course of an entire
century, and so on, down the rankings.
All names are from Social Security
card applications for births occcuring
in the United States.
You can see right away that there is a big difference
in the “spread” of
boys’ names versus girls’ names. Boys’ names
over the last century tended to bunch
up around a few immensely popular names, while the girls’ names
were distributed over a much greater
variety of names.
What names are still hot? Amazingly, five boys'
names from the top dozen of the 20th
Century - Michael, Daniel, Christopher,
Joseph and William - are still in the top twelve today. For girls,
only Elizabeth (#12 in 2005) shows
that kind of endurance. For more than
100 years, parents have been far more
traditional in picking boys' names
than for girls.
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