Baby Names by Decade

By the Baby Name Data Editorial Team · Last updated: October 2026

Decade rankings sum every recorded birth across ten years and rank the totals, which produces a different and in many ways sturdier picture than any single year can. A decade leader had to be chosen again and again by hundreds of thousands of families across a whole era, so these tables are where the genuinely durable names separate themselves from brief fashions. Each page below lists the top fifty names for girls and for boys in that decade, with the leaders' shares of all recorded births in the period and a plain explanation of how to read summed tables honestly, including the caution that the final period in this file, the 2020s, covers only the five years 2020 to 2024 and therefore totals roughly half the scale of a complete decade.

Decade totals also expose a pattern that annual tables hide: the changing depth of the popular field. In the earliest decades on this index, the fiftieth most popular name of a decade still accumulated a total that is large relative to the leader, because parents drew from a comparatively narrow pool of customary names and reused them heavily. In recent decades the leader's total has grown far less than the population did, while the number of distinct names in the annual files has multiplied, so the typical decade table now shows a flatter spread in which dozens of names hold meaningful shares at once. Reading two decade pages side by side, one early and one recent, and comparing the leader's share and the fiftieth name's total on each, is the quickest way to see that long diversification in the actual numbers rather than as a general claim.

Moving down this index in order is the fastest tour of American naming history available in these records: the long reigns of the earliest decades, the mid-century tables where a small set of names covered an exceptional share of all births, and the recent flattening in which the top of the table is shared among far more names, each with a far smaller share than the leaders of a century ago enjoyed. Every name that also appears in the all-time top hundred is linked to its own history page from inside each decade table.

One more use of this index is worth noting for readers comparing eras rather than names. Because every decade page reports its leader's share of all recorded births in the period, the index as a whole traces the long concentration story of American naming in fifteen numbers: how much of each era the single most chosen name accounted for. That sequence falls across the whole span covered here, and it does so without any single decade reversing it for long, which makes it one of the most robust patterns in the entire dataset, visible in summed decade data even where individual years wobble. The name pages then explain the same story from the other direction, showing how the long-serving leaders of the early decades each held shares that no modern name approaches.

Disclaimer: Baby Name Data publishes statistics drawn from U.S. Social Security Administration baby name records. Figures are counts of Social Security card applications by year of birth and are shown for general information only. Counts below five in any year, sex, or state are not released by the SSA and are not estimated here. Nothing on this page is advice about what to name a child.

Data: U.S. Social Security Administration baby name records, 1880–2024, retrieved October 2026. Source: ssa.gov/oact/babynames/