Name Rarity Checker

Find out how rare a first name really is: estimated living Americans, a one-in-N rarity score, and a common-to-rare rating.

How it works

The checker estimates how many living Americans carry a first name, then turns that count into something you can feel: a one-in-N figure and a rating from Very common down to Practically one of a kind. The estimate starts with the Social Security Administration's baby-name file, which records every name given to at least five babies in a year since 1880. Each birth-year's count is weighted by the odds that someone born that year is alive today, using survival rates consistent with the SSA's life tables, and the weighted years are summed.

Worked example: check Beatrix and you'll find a few thousand living bearers, which lands it in the Rare band, roughly one in every hundred thousand Americans, most of them young because the name only started climbing after 2010. Check James and the meter pins near the top: about 3.1 million living bearers, one in every 110 Americans. Same tool, five orders of magnitude apart, which is why the meter runs on a logarithmic scale.

The rating bands are fixed counts, not percentiles: Very common means a million or more living bearers, Common a quarter million, Familiar fifty thousand, Uncommon ten thousand, Rare one thousand, and Very rare anything measurable below that. A name the records can't measure at all, never five babies in any single year, earns Practically one of a kind, and honestly earns it.

FAQ

My name is common in my community but the tool says it's rare. Why?

The count covers people born in the US whose birth was registered with a Social Security number, so names carried mostly by immigrants are undercounted, sometimes heavily. If your name is common in Lagos, Seoul, or San Salvador but arrived here recently, read the result as “rare among the US-born” rather than rare among your neighbors.

Does spelling matter?

Completely. The records treat every spelling as its own name: Kaitlyn, Caitlin, Katelyn, and Caitlyn each have separate counts, and a rare spelling of a common sound will rate as rare. That's not a flaw so much as a fact about paperwork; your birth certificate spelling is what the world's databases know you by.

Can a name be too new to rate?

A brand-new name with only a few years of records still rates fine, it just rates rare, because few people carry it yet. If it's rising fast, it won't stay rare long; our popularity-over-time tool shows the trajectory so you can see whether today's rare find is tomorrow's classroom staple.