One of my favorite public datasets is the baby name data published every year by the United States Social Security Administration (SSA). When I joined Row Zero, one of the first things I did was gather this data into a single csv (it's published as one csv per year) and upload it to S3 for us to use as a test dataset. It's nice because it's not too big — less than 8 KiB gzipped — but it's still too big for Excel since it has more than 2 million rows.
We've done a lot of fun ad hoc analyses of this data set. One of my colleagues produced a graph of baby name popularity over time by final letter, which prompted me to do a deeper dive on the popularity of baby boy names ending in with the letter n, and specifically with the suffix -ayden, -aiden, or -aden. I published that on Row Zero's blog. You can read it here: The Rise of -n. That blog post also has a link to a Row Zero workbook containing all the SSA baby name data from 1880 to 2022, which you can copy to do your own analysis.
Some fun takeaways:
- The most popular final letter for baby boys in the U.S. has been n since 1963.
- The most popular final letter for baby girls in the U.S. has been a since 1935.
- Peak popularity of boy names ending in n was in 2011, at 36.4% of all baby boy names in the SSA data.
- Although -n names are broadly popular, the peak in 2011 was driven specifically by -aiden, -ayden, and -aden names, without which the peak would have been earlier and lower.
- Among Gen Z boys in the U.S., 2.6% have names ending in -ayden, -aiden, or -aden. This is a little bit higher than the popularity of Matthew for Millenials.
Again, you can read the full analysis (including graphs!) over at Row Zero's blog.
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