NobodyNamed

About

NobodyNamed turns Social Security Administration name records into a cultural dossier: peak era, trajectory, rarity, and generational association.

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.

License

Source data is CC0. The code for NobodyNamed lives in this repository.