About NewbornNames
NewbornNames is a baby-name site with an unusual constraint: it only says things its data can prove. Everything on the site — the generator, the top-100 tables, the 52 letter pages — is built from a single source, the U.S. Social Security Administration's national baby-names dataset, and every name is shown with its actual rank and the actual number of babies who received it. The site is published by Sumvia, the team behind the Sumvia.net utility network.
What the site covers
The centerpiece is the baby name generator: filter the 2025 top 1,000 per gender (or a decade snapshot back to 1955) by starting letter, name length, and popularity tier, and draw a cryptographically random sample. Around it sit the browsing pages — the top 100 boy names and top 100 girl names of 2025, plus a page for every starting letter of each gender with the top 50 names, real overall ranks, and counts. In 2025, that data starts at Olivia (13,544 girls) and Liam (20,818 boys).
Who it serves
Expecting parents hunting for a shortlist; parents-to-be checking how popular a favorite actually is before committing; writers naming characters to a period using the decade snapshots; and the merely curious. The tools stay deliberately simple: every filter is visible, and what you see is always the underlying government data, not an editorial ranking.
Where the data comes from — and its limits
The dataset is derived from Social Security card applications for U.S. births, published by the SSA as a public-domain government work. We rebuilt our copies from the official archive and committed them with a documented pipeline. The limits travel with the data and we restate them everywhere they matter: names given fewer than 5 times in a year are excluded for privacy, spelling variants are ranked separately, coverage is U.S. births only, and ties are broken alphabetically. When the SSA publishes a new year, the site is rebuilt from the new archive — the footer of every page names the data year in use.
No meanings, by choice
Most baby-name sites attach meanings, origins, and etymologies. We currently do not — not because meanings are uninteresting, but because we have no provenance-clean source for them, and inventing or scraping them would break the one promise this site makes. If meanings ever arrive, they will come with a named, checkable source, the same way the popularity data does.
Tested logic, browser-native
The generator's filtering and sampling are small, typed functions covered by automated tests — including integrity tests over the committed dataset itself (no rank gaps, counts consistent with ranks, all 26 letters present). Sampling uses your browser's cryptographic random number generator with rejection sampling, so every matching name is equally likely. Nothing you do on the site is transmitted or stored: there are no accounts, and the tools keep working offline once loaded. See the methodology page for the full approach.
Not naming advice
Popularity is a fact; whether a name is right for your child is not something a dataset can settle. The site tells you how often a name was registered — it never scores, recommends, or ranks names by quality, and a low count is not evidence a name is strange, nor a high one that it is safe.
Get in touch
Spotted a number that looks wrong, or want a tool added? See the contact page — reports of suspected data errors are especially welcome, because they are checkable against the source archive.