Baby Name Voyager
The Baby Name Wizard: NameVoyager
The Baby Name Wizard’s NameVoyager is an interactive portrait of America’s name choices. Start with a “sea” of nearly 5000 names. Type a letter, and you’ll zoom in to focus on how that initial has been used over the past century. Then type a few more letters, or a name. Each stripe is a timeline of one name, its width reflecting the name’s changing popularity. If a name intrigues you, click on its stripe for a closer look.
This is pretty interesting, but I notice that the graph is really strange for Joshua. It rises from about 0 in 1960’s, when I was born, to a peak in the ’90s, and a fairly sharp decline to 2003. That made me suspicious, since I know that the 2004 Social Security website shows Joshua as #1 (I blogged about it before). It turns out that if you hover over the decade, you get a pop-up box showing the actual ranking. The 2003 rank is 3. That peak you see there? That’s 1990’s Rank of 4. So the big downward trend in the graph seems to be simply incorrect, it should be almost imperceptibly higher than level. I don’t know how to explain it, other than a coding error in the applet.
Hat tip Marginal Revolution
June 18th, 2005 at 11:40 am
Actually, Josh, I don’t think it’s an error. The graph shows the total number of kids named Joshua. The RANK of the name can still go up while the numbers go down if, as I believe is the case, the total number of different names is increasing. All kinds of new names and alternate spellings are cropping up as people who went to school with ten Jennifers and eight Heathers try desperately to give their kids a unique name. Of course, some names have also gone excinct (witness the tragic death of “Ethel”), but I think they’re being created faster than they can die.
Another thing that could be happening is that the distribution could be evening out. One name is still ranked ahead of another whether it’s ahead by one or one thousand in actual numbers.
June 21st, 2005 at 9:28 pm
Hm. You’re right, I didn’t look at the y-axis values. It could be possible that while the absolute numbers of boys named Joshua dropped from over 10,000 per million to 6,000 per million, the rank climbed…but that’s still startling, since that means that either there were no other names that were even close, or if there were they also dropped sharply.