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| Inspiration :: Oliver (picture from Oliver Twist) |
Often one of the first criteria a couple have when
choosing a name is that it ‘isn’t too popular’. Often we look at names that are
within a certain rank – like looking at names below the top 100 or top 1000.
But using the ranks as a guide can be deceiving. For one thing, the birth
counts for boys and girls are different. The name Oliver (1st in 2014
for boys) was given to 6649 babies but Amelia (1st in 2014 for
girls) was given to 5327 babies. In this first post in a series on the
statistics of baby name popularity, I’m going to show you what popular and
unpopular really look like in the real world.
The chart below shows the proportion of babies named
out of each section.
You can see that the amount of babies given a name
from the top 100 is very similar to the number of babies given a name from
outside the top 1000. The remaining third shows a breakdown of the number of
babies given a name ranked between 100 and 1000. I was really surprised by the
number of people that choose a name outside the top 1000. This means that it is
popular to be unusual so even though your child may be the only person in their
class with their name, it won’t stand out as much because most other people
will have an unusual name of their own. But this is okay because most parents
don’t want their child to be standing out for a ‘weird’ name – they just don’t
want their child to be 1 of 3 Emily’s in a class.
Talking of classes, I made a chart to show what the
name popularities would look like in a class of 30. To do this I worked out the
percentage of babies born out of the total babies born for each 100 section of
the chart. I then found that percentage out of 30. It uses the same colour code
as the pie chart above.
If your 2014 born child was in a classroom there would
be:
9 children with names within the top 100
3 children with names ranked from 100-200
2 children with names ranked from 200-300
1 child with a name ranked from 300-400
1 child with a name ranked from 400-500
1 child with a name ranked from 500-600
1 child with a name ranked from 600-700
1 child with a name ranked from 700-1000
11 children with a name outside the top 1000
Of course this is only a model and can’t perfectly
predict every classroom. There are going to be some clubs and groups that
children are part with like minded parents. This means that there may be more
of a certain type of name. I wonder whether this makes parents more fussy about
popularity – they have a skewed view because the other parents they associate
with are naming their children similar names. When, in the big scheme of
things, the names they are choosing are not that popular.
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