So Sarah and I have been discussing baby names over the past couple of months. One of the coolest things we've found related to names is the baby name wizard. If you type in any name or root portion of a set of names (like 'Chris' for 'Christopher', 'Christian', etc.), the graph instantly shows the relative popularity of the name, by decade, from 1880 until the present. It's really cool! Who knew that 'Matthew' exploded in popularity in the 1980's? Or that a name as ubiquitous as 'John' was eight times more popular in the 1880's than today? If you run your mouse over the graph, you can also see the name's popularity rank for the decade you are mousing over.
One fun thing to do is to observe names take off in popularity after individuals who have those names become famous. It's no coincidence that 'Dwight' catapults in popularity in the 1950's or that 'Herbert' virtually disappears after 1930. And for sure try 'Wendy', just to see that even though J.M. Barrie didn't make the name up, he sure did popularize it.
One caveat: the program makes it easy to observe the relative popularity of an individual name over time, but it's a bit harder to compare the absolute popularity of two different names. This is because the graphs are scaled to "number of babies with the name per millions of babies born," but rescaled for individual names, meaning that you have to look at the Y-axis to get the absolute popularity. For instance, the scale for 'John' is topped at 30,000 names per million, while the top of the scale for 'Joanna' is topped at 500 names per million. So when both names have graph bars the same height, John is roughly 60 times more popular.
We're going to the doctor today for our scheduled monthly visit --- full details tomorrow!
One fun thing to do is to observe names take off in popularity after individuals who have those names become famous. It's no coincidence that 'Dwight' catapults in popularity in the 1950's or that 'Herbert' virtually disappears after 1930. And for sure try 'Wendy', just to see that even though J.M. Barrie didn't make the name up, he sure did popularize it.
One caveat: the program makes it easy to observe the relative popularity of an individual name over time, but it's a bit harder to compare the absolute popularity of two different names. This is because the graphs are scaled to "number of babies with the name per millions of babies born," but rescaled for individual names, meaning that you have to look at the Y-axis to get the absolute popularity. For instance, the scale for 'John' is topped at 30,000 names per million, while the top of the scale for 'Joanna' is topped at 500 names per million. So when both names have graph bars the same height, John is roughly 60 times more popular.
We're going to the doctor today for our scheduled monthly visit --- full details tomorrow!
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