Methodology

Last updated: August 2026

This page describes exactly where NameCharted's numbers come from, what is done to them before they reach a chart, and — importantly — where the data is incomplete. Coverage is not equal across countries, and some of the charts on this site rest on much thinner source data than others. That is documented below rather than hidden.

Where the data comes from

Every figure on the site originates from a national statistics agency, a state birth registry, or a public research institute. Nothing is estimated, modelled, or purchased from a third-party aggregator.

Known gaps you should read before trusting a chart

• Only the U.S. series is close to complete. The SSA publishes every name given to five or more babies, back to 1880. No other source on this site is that deep.
• England & Wales, Australia, and Spain are top-N lists. ONS and INE publish a ranked top 100 and top 50 respectively; the Australian state registries publish a similar popular-names list. A name that never reaches that cut-off will show no data at all, even though real babies were given it. Absence from these charts is not evidence that a name is unused.
• "UK" means England and Wales. The ONS dataset does not cover Scotland or Northern Ireland, which publish separately through National Records of Scotland and NISRA. The country switcher's UK option is labelled for brevity.
• Australia is not national. It is an aggregate of individual state registries — principally New South Wales and Victoria. It approximates the national picture but is not an Australian Bureau of Statistics release.
• The Netherlands series stops at 2017. It has not been refreshed since, so Dutch charts should be read as historical rather than current.
• Rare names are suppressed at source. Agencies withhold low-frequency names to prevent individual children being identifiable. Those births happened; they are simply not in any public file.

How the numbers are processed

Each source is downloaded in its published format — CSV, XLS, or ZIP — and normalised into a single table of country, year, sex, name, and count. Processing is limited to format conversion: decoding the original character encoding, standardising capitalisation, and mapping each source's sex labels onto a common F/M field.

No smoothing, interpolation, or gap-filling is applied. If an agency published a count, that exact count is what the chart plots. Where a year is missing from a source, the chart shows a gap rather than a guessed value.

How ranks are calculated

Ranks are computed by NameCharted, not taken from the source files. Within each country, year, and sex, names are sorted by birth count in descending order and numbered from 1. Boys and girls are ranked separately, so a #1 girls' name and a #1 boys' name in the same year are two different names.

Spelling variants are counted as distinct names, because the source agencies record them that way. "Aidan" and "Aiden" have separate counts, separate ranks, and separate trend lines; they are never merged. This means a sound that is popular across several spellings will look less common than it actually is.

For top-N countries, a rank is only meaningful within the published list. A name ranked #50 in Spain is the least common name in a 50-name file, not the 50th most popular name in the country.

Meanings, origins, and famous bearers

Name meanings and origin classifications are drawn from publicly available encyclopedic references. Etymology is frequently contested — many names have several defensible derivations, and reference works disagree — so these should be treated as the commonly cited interpretation rather than a settled fact.

Famous-bearer lists are generated from Wikidata, ordered by how many language editions of Wikipedia carry an article about that person. It is an automated prominence measure, not an editorial judgement about who matters.

Numerology readings are included as entertainment. They have no evidential basis and are not presented as analysis.

Editorial commentary

The "Editor's take" sections on individual name pages are built from a fact sheet compiled for that name — peak year, current rank, largest rise and fall, and overall trajectory — extracted directly from the dataset described above, so the commentary follows the figures rather than general impressions about a name.

Before publication, every entry passes an automated check that traces each number back to the source data and rejects the entry if a figure does not match. Statements about style, sound, or cultural association are opinion, and are written as opinion rather than as findings from the data.

Update cadence

The U.S. dataset is refreshed each year when the SSA publishes its annual release, typically in May. Other countries are updated as their agencies publish, which varies from annually to irregularly. The Netherlands has not published in a form we ingest since 2017.

Corrections

If a figure here contradicts the official source, the official source is right and this site has a bug. Report it to hello@namecharted.com with the name, country, and year, and it will be checked and corrected.