Sources And Methods

About Name Awesome

Name Awesome brings together baby-name meanings, historical records, popularity charts, and tools for comparing names. U.S. rankings come from published Social Security Administration data. Our charts and comparisons describe those records; estimates are identified separately.

How name articles are reviewed

The article catalog includes researched editorial articles and shorter compiled drafts. A completed rewrite requires checking its facts and reading the full article against our editorial standard. Generated drafts do not count as completed reviews. Meaning confidence and editorial completion are tracked separately: a reviewed article can still describe an uncertain origin.

Articles link to their references under Sources & methodology. Historical relationships, literal meanings, pronunciation, and cultural connections need supporting evidence. Uncertain origins remain qualified, and nickname suggestions are distinguished from established forms. Sources can disagree; disputed origins are explained where they affect the meaning.

U.S. birth records

National records span 1880–2025; state records start in 1910. U.S. popularity counts come from Social Security card applications, grouped by year of birth; they are not a complete birth census. Counts below five for a spelling, sex, and year are withheld, independently in each state. Missing means unpublished, rather than measured zero. Spellings are ranked separately.

Pronunciation groups

Identical primary CMUdict phoneme sequences merge after stress markers are removed. Names outside CMUdict can merge when normalized Wiktionary IPA matches exactly; remaining names are separate. The model can miss equivalents and merge distinct names sharing a sound. It differs from NamePlay's neural model. CMUdict is BSD licensed; Wiktionary facts use CC BY-SA 4.0.

Age estimates

Listed birth cohorts are multiplied by sex-specific survival fractions from the Social Security Administration's 2023 period life table, evaluated at whole-year ages in 2026. Current mortality is applied to every historical cohort. Immigration, name changes, unlisted counts, and post-2025 births are excluded. Birth-state maps do not track current residence.

Cohort labels

Mostly children means over 50% of the estimated population is under 18; mostly seniors means over 50% is at least 65. Broad cohorts have an interquartile age range of at least 40 years; concentrated cohorts have a range of at most 15. Generation labels follow the median estimated birth year.

Census counts

The 2020 research release contains 53,615 names and six race/Hispanic-origin categories. It retains negative privacy-noise values. Rates and lift use tabulated category totals, including 'all other names.' Counts are a living-population snapshot, not birth totals. Race is not cross-tabulated with sex.

Storage

Personal lists and notes use browser storage. Share URLs include names and titles, excluding notes. Reviews enter this application's server-side queue with an anonymous browser ID, submission time, and review text. They do not update the model automatically. Hosting must provide persistent storage for the queue.

Programmatic access

The read-only JSON endpoint at /api/name-data?names=Mary,Olivia returns up to six profiles. The MCP endpoint at /api/mcp exposes lookup, search, pronunciation, rank, Census, and age tools.