After reading a wonderful chapter about rise and fall of naming tendecies in Freakonomics, I was inspired to do a little digging of my own into which names are popular and which are not. It turns out that much of this data is available from the U.S. Census Bureau. So, it's easy to tell how popular your name is, at least in the United States - just go here.
This data tells a lot more than just how many other people out there are likely to have your same first name and that (surprise!) Smith is the most popular last name in America. For instance, it shows that 25% of surnames in the United States come from a pool of just 200 different names, even though there are hundreds of thousands of surnames in the United States. You'll also notice that this data is a lot different than the data that lists the most popular baby names of a given year (you'd expect to see fewer Mary's, Patricia's and Barbara's and more Victoria's, Jennifer's and Madison's). It also misses interesting trends that exist below its imperfect frequency-count radar, such as the black cultural phenomenon of naming children unique or "black" names. DeShawn is ranked over 1000 in the male first name ranking, but, as pointed out in Freakonomics, it is much higher among some groups.
I hope you have as much fun playing with the data as I did. I've listed the top 10 names in a few different categories for your easy viewing. For more fun with names, read through my article entitled: Finding a picture of a girl named Friday.
--------------------------------------- First ten entries in dist.all.last --------------------------------------- name freq cum.freq rank SMITH 1.006 1.006 1 JOHNSON 0.810 1.816 2 WILLIAMS 0.699 2.515 3 JONES 0.621 3.136 4 BROWN 0.621 3.757 5 DAVIS 0.480 4.237 6 MILLER 0.424 4.660 7 WILSON 0.339 5.000 8 MOORE 0.312 5.312 9 TAYLOR 0.311 5.623 10 --------------------------------------- First ten entries in dist.female.first --------------------------------------- name freq cum.freq rank MARY 2.629 2.629 1 PATRICIA 1.073 3.702 2 LINDA 1.035 4.736 3 BARBARA 0.980 5.716 4 ELIZABETH 0.937 6.653 5 JENNIFER 0.932 7.586 6 MARIA 0.828 8.414 7 SUSAN 0.794 9.209 8 MARGARET 0.768 9.976 9 DOROTHY 0.727 10.703 10 --------------------------------------- First ten entries in dist.male.first --------------------------------------- name freq cum.freq rank JAMES 3.318 3.318 1 JOHN 3.271 6.589 2 ROBERT 3.143 9.732 3 MICHAEL 2.629 12.361 4 WILLIAM 2.451 14.812 5 DAVID 2.363 17.176 6 RICHARD 1.703 18.878 7 CHARLES 1.523 20.401 8 JOSEPH 1.404 21.805 9 THOMAS 1.380 23.185 10