Baby names by generation.

Every strip on this page is a real Baby Names strip from the Huezle app, drawn by the app’s own code. More about Baby Names.

How to read the strips

Each strip is one name, with one band per year from 1880 on the left to 2024 on the right, sampled every third year. The colour is the share of babies of that sex given the name: pale blush for rare, rose for common, deep plum for everywhere. A name that defines a generation draws as one dark patch, and where the patch sits tells you the birth years.

The generations are the Pew Research Center’s: Boomers 1946–1964, Gen X 1965–1980, Millennials 1981–1996 and Gen Z 1997–2012, with Gen Alpha taken as 2013 on. A name “belongs” to a generation when its average share during those years is many times its average share in every other year.

Boomers: Linda and Debra

• Linda
• Debra

18802024

• Rare
• Common
• Everywhere

Boomers still got plenty of old names: Mary was the most common Boomer girls’ name. What marks the generation is a group of names that arrived suddenly. Linda was given to about 1 girl in 35 across the Boomer years, 14 times its average share in all other years. Debra is the most Boomer name in the data: 26 times as common during the generation as outside it, with about four-fifths of its share across all 146 years falling inside those nineteen.

Gen X: Jennifer

18802024

• Rare
• Common
• Everywhere

Jennifer is the defining Gen X name in both senses: the most common girls’ name of the generation, about 1 girl in 32, and ten times as common as in the rest of the period. The most common Gen X boys’ name tells the opposite story. It was Michael, but Michael led for four decades, so it dates nobody.

Millennials: Brittany

18802024

• Rare
• Common
• Everywhere

No name in the data belongs to one generation as completely as Brittany: it was almost 34 times as common in the Millennial years as in every other year, ahead of even Debra. Its strip is one short burst and nothing else. For more names that spiked and vanished like this, see one-hit wonder baby names.

Gen Alpha: Liam

18802024

• Rare
• Common
• Everywhere

The shares get much smaller for the youngest generations, because parents now choose from far more names. Even so, Liam stands out: it was the most common Gen Alpha boys’ name, about 1 boy in 89, and 24 times as common as in all the years before. In every sampled year up to 1991 fewer than 1 boy in 7,000 was named Liam.

What the data is

Shares come from the US Social Security Administration’s national baby-name records, counted separately for girls and boys, sampled every third year from 1880 to 2024. Each generation is judged on the sampled years it contains, from seven for the Boomers to four so far for Gen Alpha. For how the single top name changed, see the decade story; for names that came back after skipping a few generations, see names that came back.

Questions