Baby-naming trends

This won't be genealogy for a few decades yet, but it's fun. The Name Voyager graphs U.S. baby-name frequencies from 1880 to the present. Type in a few letters, and the graph adjusts to show just names that begin that way. For example, Daniel peaked in the 1980s at just over 9,000 per million U.S. babies, but if you type just Dan, you can see Dana (peaked in the 1950s for boys, 1970s for girls), Danielle (3,500 per million in the 1980s, down to 750 per million in 2005), and others. Laura Wattenberg, who created this, also runs the Baby Name Wizard Blog, which discusses trends in baby names. (The blog is aimed at expecting parents.) Two example posts:

• names that dropped off the top-1,000 list in 2005 (including Arnold, Guy, and Dorothy) and
• the influence of hurricane names on baby names (for example, Hurricane Alicia in 1983 produced about an extra 2,000 Alicias per year for the rest of the decade).