I got curious and started digging through the Social Security Administration's baby name database.
They registered 3,305,259 baby names during 2020. E.g. there were 17,547 babies named Olivia and 19,690 babies named Liam. They also record these babies as F or M so we know that Olivia was 17,535 F to 12 M and Liam was 19,659 M to 31 F.
Those names split pretty strongly towards F or M, what about names that don't? I wanted names that were used more, and had relatively little split in usage. I weighted those to make a score:
ln(max(M,F)) * min(M, F) / max(M, F)
Here's the top 10 by my score:
The Top 100 Less-Gendered Baby Names of 2020. (Includes the 10 year trend history of those names.)
Further down the list "Wisdom" comes in with an even 41 babies each way. Nice.
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Those peaks for Olivia and Liam sound pretty good, but what was the biggest year for any name ever? The SSA database goes back to 1880 and the record I found is in 1947 when we got 99,693 new baby girls named Linda and 94,764 new baby boys named James. In the leading years of the baby boom, 1947 recorded 3,602,196 babies named, while 2020 recorded only 3,305,259.
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Those were the biggest names ever, how about the names that are gone. I found the names with the highest peaks that haven't been seen at all since 2010. Throughout this category we get a lot of diminutive forms: Pam from Pamela, Dick from Richard, etc.; a bunch of alternative spellings; and a bunch of things that were never very popular that faded away.
For more, see the Top 100 Names Lost To History.
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From 1880 to 2020 the database records 519 boys named Sue (and 144,489 girls).
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None of the names recorded contain the word 'table'.
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