A Personal Name Comparator Sensitive to Cultural Trends
Saturday, January 16th, 2021 06:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jesse_the_kVisit https://time.com/3856405/baby-name-popularity/
The form prompts you to input a name and its associated birth date, as well as choose from male or female gender.
It returns the popularity rank of that name in the specified year, which it calls your "today name." It then lists sixteen names which occupy the same relative position, beginning with the 1890s.
My birth name (not Jesse) was the 41st most popular for my birth year. Today that would be Natalie; in the 1970s it would be Carrie; in the 1900s it would be Thelma.
This delighted me for no particular reason. The data is pulled from U.S. Social Security records:
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/
Social security started in 1937, so I can't explain how their data can reach back to 1890.
ETA: Thanks to cosmolinguist for the link.