Baby Name Statistics
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Just me on Monday, August 02, 2010 8:53 PM
As a big-time baby-name geek, I’ve spent hours on the Social Security Administration’s baby name page and on the Baby Name Wizard, looking at statistics on different names.
But as a person with a very unusual name, I’ve always been bothered by the fact that I couldn’t look up names beyond the top 1000. There was no way, as far as I could tell, to see how many US babies were named “Arwen” the year I was born - or now, since the name still hasn’t broken into the top 1000, despite the popularity of the Lord of the Rings movies.
However! Guess what? There is actually a way to see these numbers.
Based on the response to previous posts on the topic, I know I’m not the only person around here who loves the topic of baby names. If you’re fascinated by the topic like I am, you might be as excited as I was to find that on this page on the SSA site, you can download a bunch of text files that list, for each year, every single baby name that was used for five or more babies.
The text files are not particularly easy to navigate, but using the “Find” feature, I was able to make it work.
So now I’ve got the information I’ve been looking for all this time. In 1982, the year I was born, there were 27 baby girls named Arwen. Last year there were 81. In 2004, when the movies were popular, the name appears to have peaked with 165 baby Arwens that year.
I guess the name isn’t going to make a meteoric rise in popularity, after all. Shoot.
If you’re as name-geeky as I am, I hope you enjoy the files with the extra information!
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