About

Why we measure baby names by sound, not spelling

Most charts rank spellings. Namesonder ranks names as you'd hear them — so Aiden, Ayden, and Aaden count as one popular name, not three small ones.

The test: yell it across a crowded park — who turns around? Everyone who'd turn for "AY-den" is one group, however it's spelled. That's the unit the whole site is built on.

Split apart on a spelling chart, each version of a name looks rarer than it really is. Grouped by sound, a name shows its real popularity.

What counts as the same name?

Names that share a sound are merged: Jackson + Jaxon + Jaxson, Catherine + Katherine, Sophia + Sofia. The first and last vowel sound stay fixed, so genuinely different names stay apart — Jose ≠ Joshua, Mary ≠ Mario ≠ Maria, Charles ≠ Carlos. It's an automatic rule, not a hand-picked list, so a few odd pairings slip through. Hover any name on the chart to see exactly which spellings it includes.

Where does the data come from?

U.S. Social Security Administration national baby-name records, 1880–2025. Namesonder groups those names by sound one spelling at a time — each pronunciation is looked up by hand — so the chart doesn't yet cover every name in that database. It currently covers the most common names, and more are added as the work continues.

How is popularity measured?

The default is share — births per 100,000 that year — because raw counts mislead: far more births are recorded today than in 1900, so a raw-count line mostly tracks population growth, not a name's popularity. Share asks the real question: of all babies born that year, how many got this name? You can switch to raw count or rank anytime.

Which pronunciation is the main one?

These names come from the U.S. Social Security database, so Namesonder reads each one in American English, and the American English pronunciation is the primary one on record for every spelling.

This is a consistency choice for the data, not a ranking of languages. Measuring every name against one yardstick is what lets spellings from every origin — Spanish, Irish, Hebrew, Vietnamese — sit on the same chart and be compared fairly; mixing pronunciation systems would make the groups inconsistent and the counts unreliable. Other pronunciations are no less valid: where a name is also commonly said another way, that reading is recorded too, as an alternate that feeds the shaded band (below), so it still shapes the group's range.

What does the shaded band mean?

Some spellings could belong to more than one sound group — Catherine/Katherine vs. Kathryn. The source records spelling and count but never pronunciation, so a group's size is shown honestly as a range:

• The solid line is the floor — only the spellings that unambiguously belong.
• The shaded band above it, up to the dashed edge, is the ceiling — the most the group could reach if every ambiguous spelling counted here.

A thick band means a lot of the size is genuinely uncertain; no band means every spelling is clear. (Shown for share and count, not rank.)

How does each spelling get its sound?

Spelling is an unreliable guide to sound — the letters in Phoebe barely hint that it's said FEE-bee. So rather than guess from the spelling, each name's real pronunciation is looked up and recorded as a short respelling, and every group is built from those sounds.

When a spelling is genuinely said more than one way, we don't try to guess how many babies use each version — the records don't tell us. Rather than invent a split, we keep both readings: one anchors the group, the other feeds the band.