Baby name trends: which naming styles are rising

How this is measured

Each of the 14 styles is a curated tag on a name — Nature, Vintage, Biblical and so on. A style’s position in a given year is the median rank of every name carrying that tag, so one runaway name cannot move the whole style on its own. The rankings behind this page cover 10,379 distinct names; the styles are drawn from the editorially tagged subset of them.

Girls’ and boys’ lists are measured separately throughout. A style can be climbing on one list and sliding on the other in the same place and the same years, and a median pooled across both reports neither of those movements.

Countries come first, and the places inside a country follow it under their own heading. A country is compared with other countries; a place inside one is shown as part of it, because its births are already inside its country’s totals. Those inner places are given tables rather than a chart each, so the charts stay on the comparison that is actually between independent lists; every median they hold is the same figure a chart would plot, written as the first year’s position, an arrow, and the last year’s. A blank cell means fewer than 5 names carrying that style were ranked in both years there.

Only names ranked in both of a place’s compared years are counted, on both ends of the measurement. Comparing whichever names happened to chart each year would report a change of sample as a change of taste. Styles with fewer than 5 such names are left off entirely, and ranks past #1,000 are excluded, matching every other chart on this site. Each place is measured across its own range of complete years, so two places are not always compared over the same span.

See also the individual names moving fastest, or where the USA and Canada disagree most.