1910s baby names

A mass decade with a narrower effective core

The 1910s cover 1910–1919 and contain 14,831,446 recorded births: 8,156,259 girls and 6,675,187 boys, across 15,258 distinct names. Mary is the girls’ champion with 478,636 births; John is the boys’ champion with 376,311. The independent anchor agrees on the total and both champions, including their counts.

Despite the much larger birth total, the distribution is more concentrated than the 1900s on the diversity measures: the top ten account for 18.02% and the top hundred for 54.54%; the diversity score is 66.1716, the effective number of names is 586.53, and the concentration score is 0.5703. The effective roster still grows in absolute terms because the decade is much larger, but the lower diversity score indicates a tighter distribution than the immediately preceding profile. This is a descriptive comparison, not an explanation.

Lucile leads girls’ ownership with 11,738 decade births out of 34,887 lifetime births, a 0.336458 decade share, and an ownership score of 84.8093; it ranks 137th in popularity. Woodrow leads boys’ ownership with 18,355 decade births out of 39,107 lifetime births, a 0.469353 decade share, and an ownership score of 87.2872; it ranks 67th in popularity. Mary and John remain the popularity champions, while Lucile and Woodrow are the names whose recorded histories are more concentrated in the 1910s under this scoring system.

The representative classroom uses 1914 and has 16 girls’ seats and 14 boys’ seats. It contains 30 unique names, with repeatedNames equal to 0 and the most repeated name at one seat; the stored top-share display is 0.0333. As elsewhere, this is an apportionment from one anchor year rather than a claim about the lived experience of every 1910s classroom.

The strongest approved family is Catherine: Catherine (65,823), Katherine (36,884), Katharine (2,854), and Kathryn (29,235) combine to 134,796 births. The forms are semantically defensible spelling variants and each clears 1,000 births; the family is well above the 20,000 combined threshold. Other approved families also clear review—Elizabeth/Elisabeth totals 118,972, Marian/Marion 60,132, Eleanor/Elinor 58,173, and Sarah/Sara 53,529—but none is larger than Catherine. Cathryn is rejected at 981 births because it remains below the per-variant threshold.

The SSA files suppress name-year counts below five and record sex rather than gender, so the long tail is necessarily understated and the category is not a complete account of identity. Ownership is calculated over recorded births through 2025 and is a descriptive concentration statistic, not evidence that a historical event caused a naming pattern. The profile can show what is present in the file; it cannot establish why the 1910s looked this way.