Reply to A useful thread for figuring out if a name is "too popular"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Just for fun, I plugged the top names and their percentage of births in 2020 into a spreadsheet so I could look at the numbers a bit. I thought this was interesting:

Olivia (#1) was given to 1% of all girls born in 2020.
Harper (#10) is the name that is exactly half as popular as Olivia, with .5% of all girls named Harper.
Willow (#48) is exactly half as popular as Harper, with .25%
Margaret (#126) is exactly half as popular as Willow, with .124%
Milani (#267) is half as popular as Margaret, with .062%

I like these stats because they show how few kids get any one name. But I also like how they kind of show what kinds of names are popping up at what level of popularity, and it's about what you'd expect. Olivia is classic and popular, so it's common. Harper and Willow are pretty but sound more modern, so they are "on trend" but a lot less common than Olivia. Margaret is a classic that is not in favor, so it's much lower down the list. Milani is an unusual name.

I think these are all great names but different kinds of parents are going to feel differently about how common, classic, modern, or unusual they are. The rankings really don't tell the whole story.[/quote]

Don't forget to consider number of live births.   Remember that the Baby Buster, aka Gen X, era, started in 1965 and live births in the US dropped below 4M births each year (the Baby Boom years all had more than 4M live births).   It went down to a low of 3.1M from 1973-1976 and did not climb back up to 4M until 1989.  So the most popular Jennifer era (where about 4% of the girls were named Jennifer) was during low birth eras.  So about 65K girls were named Jennifer.  Now, there are 4.1M live births per year and at 1%, that means about 21K girls are named Olivia.  If you don't take into account number of live births, it would seem to be 4x as many girls named Jennifer in the 1970's than Olivia now, but it's really more like 3x as many.

In the 1980's live births hovered closer to 3.5M per year.

[url]https://www.infoplease.com/us/population/live-births-and-birth-rates-year[/url][/quote]

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