About Happy Baby Names

Happy Baby Names started as a simple idea: choosing a name with someone else is a negotiation, and negotiations go better when nobody has to say a name out loud and watch the other person's face fall. So you both swipe privately, and the site only shows you the names you both liked.

Where the data comes from

Every popularity figure and chart on this site is derived from the United States Social Security Administration's baby name records, which cover every name given to five or more babies in a year from 1880 onwards. That data is in the public domain.

The name lists for other languages are curated by hand rather than scraped from civil registries. A registry dump contains every one-off spelling anyone has ever registered, which makes for a terrible deck of cards. We would rather show you two hundred real Dutch names than forty thousand rows.

How we write name pages

Name pages come in two kinds, and we try to be honest about which is which.

Some names have a written history: an etymology, the story of how the name travelled, and the people who carried it. Those are researched and written by a person. Where an etymology is genuinely disputed - and for names like Arthur, Ava and Oliver it really is - we say so instead of picking the prettiest theory and asserting it.

Other names have a page built from the popularity record alone: how many babies have been given the name, when it peaked, whether it is rising or falling. Those pages do not invent an etymology. If we do not know what a name means, the page will not tell you.

Privacy

You do not need an account to use the site. See the privacy page for what we store.