what happened to “mabel”?

Remember for a while every baby girl was named “Brittany”? But when was the last time you knew of a baby named “Mabel”?

The Baby Name Wizard’s NameVoyager is an interactive portrait of America’s name choices. The Java applet at www.babynamewizard.com allows you to explore the sea of names, letter by letter… Watch trends rise and fall, and dive in deeper to see your favorite name’s place in the historical tides.

Go to the website and click on “Launch Name Voyager” to load the Java applet. It may take a short while, and there may be an advertisement to skip over, but it’s worth it. (If the advertisement starts to play, just press “skip” in the upper right corner.)

You start with a “sea” of nearly 5000 names over the past 12 decades. Type a letter, and you’ll zoom in to focus on how that initial has been used over time. Then type a few more letters, or a name. Each stripe is a timeline of one name, its width reflecting the name’s changing popularity. If a name intrigues you, click on its stripe for a closer look.

For example, “John” was ranked number 2 of all names in the 1880s, but dropped to number 4 in the 1950s (my decade) with about 22,000 babies in a million given that name. Today, the proportion is even less.

So, what are the most popular baby names these days? For boys, it’s “Jacob” and for girls, it’s “Emily”.

“Brittany” has [thankfully] dropped from number 7 in the 1990s back down to 240 today.