Baby names for 2024

Everything you need to know and more

The Social Security Administration has posted the top 1000 baby names for 2024, and as I did last year (5/28/2025), here is everything you might want to know. The data for 2023 and 2024 are available on my GitHub site.

We’ll start out with a table of the top 100 names plus where they ranked last year as well as the change in the ranking. Only one name fell out of the top 10, and that was Luna, which is now a 12th-ranked female name. For male names, the top 3 remained unchanged. The table is sortable by clicking on a column name. For instance, you might be interested in the names that gained or lost the most in the top 100.

As with last year, I find the distribution of names fascinating. Since there are 1,390,759 males and 1,282,240 females, we’ll use percentages instead of counts.

Figure 1: Data from the Social Security Administration

The distribution doesn’t exactly follow the Pareto 80-20; in this case we would have the top 20% of names used account for 80% of all babies. What we have are the top 200 female names, accounting for 40% of babies, while for males, it is 49%. It is interesting that male names cluster at the top more than female names.

This starts at the top, as Liam is 1.2% of all male names, while Olivia is 0.83% of all female names. In this instance, Liam surpasses Olivia in usage by 44.6%; (1.2-0.83)/0.83 = 44.6%. Figure 2 gives this differential for the top 20 names. Only the 4th, 5th, and 6th female names are used more than the corresponding male names, with the 7th being a tie. Beyond that, the top 20 male names are used much more than the top 20 female names.

Figure 2: Data from the Social Security Administration

Here’s what Figure 2 looks like for all 1000 names in Figure 3. Most all of the top 250 male names are used more than the correspondingly ranked female names. Female names catch up in clusters after that. All I can conjecture is there is more of a desire to use unique names for females than for males. Your conjectures and explanations are welcome in the comments.

This may not be a new phenomenon. Going back to 1880, the top male name was John, used for 8.2% of all male names, while Mary was 7.2% of all female names, but the number 2 names were William (8.1%) compared to Anna (2.67%).

Figure 3: Data from the Social Security Administration

One more graph to help you with trivia night. Figure 4 shows the distribution of first letters of names for females and males. Almost 9% of all male names given in 2024 start with a J. Meanwhile, almost 10% of all female names given in 2024 start with A. The ratio is largely unchanged from last year, which makes sense as names don’t drop off the list often, and when they do, they are already rarely used.

Figure 4: Data from the Social Security Administration

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Please let me know if you believe I expressed something incorrectly or misinterpreted the data. I'd rather know the truth and understand the world than be correct. I welcome comments and disagreement. We should all be forced to express our opinions and change our minds, but we should also know how to respectfully disagree and move on. Please feel free to share article ideas, feedback, or any other thoughts at briefedbydata@substack.com.

Bio

I am a tenured mathematics professor at Ithaca College (PhD in Math: Stochastic Processes, MS in Applied Statistics, MS in Math, BS in Math, BS in Exercise Science), and I consider myself an accidental academic (opinions are my own). I'm a gardener, drummer, rower, runner, inline skater, 46er, and R user. I’ve written the textbooks “R for College Mathematics and Statistics” and “Applied Calculus with R.” I welcome any collaborations.