Data qualifications

1. Names are restricted to cases where the year of birth, sex, and state of birth are on record, and where the given name is at least 2 characters long.
2. National name data is restricted to births in the 50 States and District of Columbia. We also provide popular names for births in U. S. territories (American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands). The data on births in U. S. territories are not included in our national data.
3. Name data are tabulated from the "First Name" field of the Social Security Card Application. Hyphens and spaces are removed, thus Julie-Anne, Julie Anne, and Julieanne will be counted as a single entry.
4. Name data are not edited. For example, the sex associated with a name may be incorrect. Entries such as "Unknown" and "Baby" are not removed from the lists.
5. Different spellings of similar names are not combined. For example, the names Caitlin, Caitlyn, Kaitlin, Kaitlyn, Kaitlynn, Katelyn, and Katelynn are considered separate names and each has its own rank.
6. When two different names are tied with the same frequency for a given year of birth, we break the tie by assigning rank in alphabetical order.
7. Some names are applied to both males and females (for example, Micah). Our rankings are done by sex, so that a name such as Micah will have a different rank for males as compared to females. When you seek the popularity of a specific name (see "Popularity of a Name"), you can specify the sex. If you do not specify the sex, we provide rankings for the more popular name-sex combination.
8. To safeguard privacy, we exclude from our tabulated lists of names those that would indicate, or would allow the ability to determine, names with fewer than 5 occurrences in any geographic area. If a name has less than 5 occurrences for a year of birth in any state, the sum of the state counts for that year will be less than the national count.