Hazel was the #18 name for girls in 1897. By 1983 it had fallen to #1,333, and in 2025 it was back at #21. Social Security records show 22 girls’ names and 8 boys’ names with the same arc: popular before 1940, far down the list in the second half of the century, and back … Read more
No one can tell you exactly how many people in the world share your name. There is no global register of names: each country keeps its own records, in its own alphabet, and many countries publish no name statistics at all. What can be counted well is how many people have your name in the … Read more
A name is rare or common because of how many people have it. On How Many of Mee, that means how many people alive in the US have the name today. Most names are rare: of the 105,966 first names in Social Security records, 103,507 belong to 10,000 people or fewer. A small group of … Read more
The rarest baby names on record were given to just 5 babies in one year and never again. Social Security has 14,881 of them from 1880 to 2025. Five is the floor: a name appears in the public records only in years when at least 5 babies of the same sex received it, so any … Read more
The most common male name in the US is Michael: about 3,595,413 people alive today have it, by How Many of Mee’s estimate from Social Security records. Among babies, the most common boy name is Liam, given to 20,818 boys in 2025 and #1 every year since 2017. This guide lists the 50 most common … Read more
The most common female name in the US is Mary: about 1,715,483 people alive today have it, by How Many of Mee’s estimate from Social Security records. Among babies, the most common girl name is Olivia, given to 13,544 girls in 2025 and #1 every year since 2019. This guide lists the 50 most common … Read more
Jennifer was the top name for girls every year from 1970 to 1984. In 1972, its peak, 63,600 girls got the name. In 2025, 501 did, and it ranked #586. Most names follow some version of that curve, but not all. Social Security records since 1880 show a handful of shapes that a name’s popularity … Read more
James was the most popular boys’ name of the 1950s, just ahead of Michael: 843,768 babies against 837,471. Michael then led every decade from the 1960s through the 1990s. Girls’ names changed faster: 7 different names led the 8 decades, and only Jessica led twice, in the 1980s and 1990s. These rankings come from Social … Read more
A unique last name is one very few people share. The Census Bureau’s 2010 surname list counts every surname held by at least 100 people in the US: 162,253 of them. 118,969 of those, 73%, belong to fewer than 500 people each, and another 29,312,001 people had surnames too rare to be listed at all. … Read more
No government record counts how many people share a full name. Social Security publishes counts of first names, and the Census Bureau publishes counts of last names, but nobody publishes the two together. What you can do is estimate: combine how common your first name is with how common your last name is. This guide … Read more