BabyNameLens · Girl names · Boy names
BabyNameLens began with a simple question: show me a classic name that isn't currently popular.
A name's trend and its current popularity are different things. A name can be a timeless classic sitting quietly outside the top 500, or a brand-new invention ranked #30. Parents rarely want just "a classic" or just "something rare" — and taste shifts from child to child: for one, a classic flying under the radar feels right; for another, something rarer still — familiar, but a few layers down the popularity scale; for a third, a beloved classic everyone knows. Finding names that way requires treating trend and popularity as separate, combinable filters.
Every chart on this site is drawn from official records, not estimates:
US birth records since 1880 — official statistics (SSA), covering more than 140 years, nationally and for every state and DC.
International standings from official national statistics offices, shown where a name charts abroad.
Structured reference data from open sources such as Wikidata.
Popularity ranks, trend curves, state maps, and "1 in N born" figures all trace back to these records.
Beyond the records themselves, BabyNameLens runs its own analysis:
Trend classification — every name's full curve is analyzed and classified (a steady classic, a comeback, a fresh arrival, a quiet fade), along with its peak era and popularity tier.
Forecasts of where a name's curve is heading, produced by statistical models trained on 140+ years of trajectories.
Career patterns built from more than 3.3 million notable people: for each name, which fields its bearers appear in disproportionately often — the professions that quietly shape how a name is perceived.
A curated layer of more than 19,000 famous bearers and 6,000 fictional characters across the catalog.
Name meanings on BabyNameLens are researched against open, checkable references: established dictionaries, the Wikipedia and Wiktionary projects, and public-domain name scholarship. A meaning appears on a page when it can be traced to a real source — a documented word, a recorded person or place, a verifiable usage.
When it can't, the page says so: "Meaning not established." Hundreds of modern names — many built from sounds parents love rather than from ancient words — genuinely have no established meaning, and we won't invent one: no folklore, only sources, and the honest blank treated as part of the data. Research is ongoing, and meanings are added as evidence is found.
Questions, corrections, and sources we should know about: contact@babynamelens.com. Corrections that survive verification get published.