Methodology & Data Sources
babynames.help is built on primary data. This page documents exactly where our data comes from, how we use it, and the licence each source is provided under. If you spot an error, please let us know.
Popularity & trends
Popularity figures and the year-by-year trend charts are compiled from official birth-registration data published by national statistics offices, including:
- United States — Social Security Administration (public domain)
- United Kingdom — Office for National Statistics, National Records of Scotland, NISRA (Open Government Licence)
- Ireland — Central Statistics Office
- France — INSEE (1900 to present)
- Europe — Belgium (Statbel), Netherlands (Meertens), Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Finland
- Rest of world — Canada (Statistics Canada and provincial registries), Australia (state registries), New Zealand (Department of Internal Affairs)
For names and regions where official yearly data is not available, we supplement coverage with an aggregate global name-frequency dataset (a measure of how many people carry a name, not a yearly birth count) so lesser-covered names still show meaningful information. These figures are treated as overall frequency, never presented as birth registrations.
Pronunciation
Verified IPA pronunciations are derived from the Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary (CMUdict), released under the BSD-2 licence.
Gender usage by country
Data on how a name’s gender usage varies between countries comes from the World Gender-Name Dictionary 2.0 (WGND 2.0), released under CC0 via Harvard Dataverse.
Short forms & nicknames
Nickname and short-form relationships are drawn from the open nicknames dataset (carltonnorthern/nicknames, Apache-2.0 licence).
Name days
Name-day calendars are compiled from openly licensed national sources (for example Hungarian and Slovak name-day datasets released under the MIT licence), each attributed on the page where it appears.
Notable name-bearers
Notable people who share a name are drawn from Wikidata (CC0), ranked by prominence.
How we keep it accurate
Popularity data is refreshed as statistics offices publish new years. We cite the dataset behind each data point, and where we lack reliable data we leave it blank rather than guess. Corrections are always welcome via our contact page.