About
NobodyNamed turns Social Security Administration name records into a cultural dossier: peak era, trajectory, rarity, and generational association.
What you can do here
Every name page is a complete vital record: when the name peaked and how many babies got it that year, how fast it declined, whether it went extinct or staged a comeback, its median-age profile, and a state-by-state map of where it lives today. Start from the curated lists — extinct names, endangered names, and comeback names — or run any name through the search box. Each list is ranked by the underlying birth data, not editorial opinion.
The project exists because naming data answers questions almost nowhere else does: How many living Americans are named Theodore? What was the most popular name the year your mother was born? Which 1880s frontier names survived into the smartphone era? Every answer traces back to a specific SSA record year.
The data
The underlying dataset is released by the Social Security Administration under a CC0 public-domain dedication. It lists, for every year since 1880, every first name given to at least five American babies that year, along with the count and the sex recorded on the application. Data is refreshed automatically from the SSA once it is updated (typically each May).
What "status" means
- Rising: the last five years saw at least 20% more babies than the preceding five.
- Stable: the last five years are within ±20% of the preceding five.
- Declining: the last five years saw at least 20% fewer babies than the preceding five.
- Endangered: peaked above 200 per year, but the most recent year came in at 10% of peak or lower.
- Extinct: fewer than five babies have been given the name in any of the last ten years on record.
What's missing
Names given to fewer than five babies in a given year are omitted from the SSA file entirely — not zeroed out. A "zero" here means "fewer than five," not "none."
Infrastructure
NobodyNamed runs entirely on the Cloudflare edge: Cloudflare Pages for static assets and server-side rendering, D1 (SQLite) for the name database, and a cron-triggered Worker for annual data refresh from the SSA.
API & MCP server
All of this data is queryable directly — a free REST API and a remote MCP server for AI agents, no auth required. See Developers for the endpoint, connection config, and the full list of tools.
License
Source data is CC0. The code for NobodyNamed lives in this repository.