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Top gender-neutral names given to 2023 babies, per US SSA data

These are the most-used gender-neutral names given to babies born in 2023.

[namesnums]

Top gender-neutral names given to 2022 babies, per US SSA data

These are the most-used gender-neutral names given to babies born in 2022.

[namesnums]

Average Scrabble score of US names, weighted by usage

The average Scrabble score is increasing, but the trend falls apart when we weight by the number of usages.

It's important to weight by the number of usages because we want to consider the number of babies actually given each name.

Scrabble points from here:

1 point: E, A, I, O, N, R, T, L, S, U 2 points: D, G 3 points: B, C, M, P 4 points: F, H, V, W, Y 5 points: K 8 points: J, X 10 points: Q, Z

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More and more uncommon names are excluded from the SSA name dataset.

For privacy reasons, the SSA name dataset excludes very uncommon names.

The graph below shows the percent of Social Security card applicants that have been excluded from the SSA name dataset each year.

Per the stated limitations of the SSA name dataset:

To safeguard privacy, we exclude from our tabulated lists of names those that would indicate, or would allow the ability to determine, names with fewer than 5 occurrences in any geographic area. If a name has less than 5 occurrences for a year of birth in any state, the sum of the state counts for that year will be less than the national count.

The SSA also publishes a table with the number of Social Security card applicants by year. This table contains total numbers and not specific names, so applicants with very uncommon names are accounted for in this table. Each year, there is a gap between the number of Social Security card applicants and the number of births accounted for in the SSA name dataset.

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SSA datasets & caveats

Datasets from the United States Social Security Administration are available on SSA.gov.

- Beyond the Top 1000 Names: national, state-level, and territory-level data ^ Some important background and limitations

- Number of Social Security card applicants by year

- Actuarial Tables