Where this baby name data comes from
Every ranking on this site counts real births registered with a government office in Alberta, British Columbia, Canada, Ontario, Quebec, USA, 2020–2024. Nothing here is a survey, a sample or an estimate. This page names each source, says what it publishes, and says what it leaves out.
The sources
| Place | Publisher | Years | Names | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alberta | Government of Alberta Alberta open data, which publishes its own rank alongside each birth count. | 2020–2024 | 2,588 | As published by the source |
| British Columbia | BC Vital Statistics Agency British Columbia open data, published as a name-by-year matrix. | 2020–2024 | 2,265 | Derived here from birth counts |
| Canada | Statistics Canada The annual press release, which publishes only a top ten. This is why the newest Canadian national year is ten names per sex rather than a full list. | 2024 | 20 | As published by the source |
| Canada | Statistics Canada The national baby-name series for the years before the most recent release, loaded via a third-party compilation rather than from Statistics Canada directly. | 2020–2023 | 9,133 | Derived here from birth counts |
| Ontario | Government of Ontario Ontario open data, one row per name and year with a birth count. | 2020–2024 | 4,556 | Derived here from birth counts |
| Quebec | Retraite Quebec, via Donnees Quebec Quebec open data, published as a name-by-year matrix. | 2020–2024 | 2,640 | Derived here from birth counts |
| USA | United States Social Security Administration The SSA's national baby-name data, which it publishes each May for the previous year. These rows were loaded from a third-party mirror of it rather than from the SSA archive directly, and the birth counts behind the ranks did not come with them. | 2020–2024 | 2,165 | As published by the source |
How a rank is decided
Most of these lists publish birth counts without a ranking. For those, a name's rank is its position when that year's names are ordered by births, with ties broken alphabetically, so every list runs from 1 to N with one name in each position.
Alberta is the exception: it publishes its own rank, and its ranking is competition-style, so names with the same number of births share a rank and the next rank skips ahead. Those ranks are passed through exactly as published rather than recomputed, which is why an Alberta list can show two names at #64 and none at #65 or #66.
Canada, USA publish ranks without the underlying birth counts, so nothing on this site reports a number of babies for those lists.
What these lists leave out
Each government suppresses rare names differently, and none of them publishes a complete register of every name given. A name missing from a list here is usually a name that fell under that place's own reporting threshold, not a name nobody chose.
Alberta publishes every name down to a single birth, which is a different problem: at that depth a one-birth difference swings a name hundreds of places, so names with fewer than five births are dropped rather than presented as a meaningful ranking. That brings Alberta into line with the floor the other lists already have from their own suppression rules.
A handful of Alberta rows arrive with a word from the file's own suppression note in the name column instead of a name. Those are rejected by name, matched whole, so that registered names beginning with the same letters are kept.
Name meanings and style groupings are editorial. They are the only thing on this site that is not read out of a government file, and they are never used to change a rank.
When it updates
Each source publishes on its own schedule, so the most recent year is not the same everywhere — the table above shows the years actually loaded for each place. Ranked lists are rebuilt from the database whenever new data lands, so a page's year always matches the data behind it.