Baby Name Generator
Generate baby-name ideas by style (classic, vintage, modern, rare), first letter, and popularity band — from real SSA data, not a made-up list.
Suggestions come from the 1,200 most-carried names of each sex in SSA records, filtered by the era they peaked and how popular they are for babies right now. The living-count figures are our survival-weighted estimates; the variation number just reshuffles the draw, so the same settings always reproduce the same list.
How it works
Most name generators pull from an editor's list with an opinion baked in. This one pulls from the record: the 1,200 most-carried names for each sex in Social Security data, which stretch from Victorian heirlooms to names that didn't exist a decade ago. Your filters do the shaping. The era filter uses each name's peak year, the year it was given to the most babies, to sort vintage from classic from modern. The popularity filter uses today's ranking, so you can ask specifically for names that are beautiful, proven, and not currently in every stroller.
Worked example: set Girls, Vintage, and Distinctive and you get names like Opal, Cleo, and Marguerite, names that peaked before 1950, sat out two generations, and are barely used today, which is precisely what makes them feel fresh again. Flip popularity to Popular and the same era filter surfaces the vintage revivals already underway, like Alice and Hazel. The “variation” number reshuffles the deck deterministically: variation 3 with the same filters always deals the same names, so you can find a list again tomorrow.
Under each suggestion we show its era, peak year, and roughly how many Americans carry it now, our survival-weighted estimate from the same records. That last number is the honest check on “unique”: a name can feel rare to you while 200,000 people answer to it, and the generator makes that visible before you fall in love.
FAQ
Why don't I see ultra-rare or invented names?
The pool is the top 1,200 names per sex by living bearers, which reaches well into uncommon territory but stops short of names carried by only a few hundred people. That's deliberate: a generator's job is a usable shortlist, and our rarity checker is the better tool for vetting a one-of-a-kind find you already have in mind.
What does the era label actually mean?
It's the decade character of the name, keyed to its peak year in the records: Vintage peaked by 1950, Classic between 1951 and 1990, Millennial through 2009, and Modern from 2010 on. A name's peak is when the most babies received it, which is why a Classic name “sounds like” a parent or teacher — statistically, it is.
Why does the same variation always give the same names?
The shuffle is seeded by the variation number instead of being random, which turns a slot machine into a catalog. You can page through variations, send your partner “girls, vintage, variation 7,” and they'll see exactly the list you saw.