Baby Name Recommendations

How a name is scored

Gender, length and first letters are conditions rather than preferences: a name that misses one is dropped, not marked down. The score out of 100 reads the style alone, measured against every name in the data rather than against the ones that survived your conditions — so 100 is the most popular name there is, not merely the most popular one left, and a name keeps its score when you change something unrelated.

Widely used and rarely used read each list’s most recent position — opposite ends of the same measure, on a log scale, so that #1 and #1,000 are as far apart in the score as they are in real life. Rising fast reads how far a name climbed across Canada 2020–2023 and United States 2020–2024 and passes over names that fell. Steady rewards the names that barely moved either way. Movement is only read inside the top 1,000 of a list: further down, a handful of births swings a name thousands of places, which is noise rather than a trend.

Birth counts come from Canada only — United States publishes positions without them, so a count beside a name covers just the lists that publish one. Every number here is a government birth registration; nothing is estimated. See the same data laid out year by year in the rankings, or grouped by style in the collections.