Choosing a name is one of the few decisions a parent makes that the child carries for life. The sites that help with it are, almost without exception, funded by advertising, and it shows: pop-ups, auto-playing video, and pages assembled to hold attention rather than answer a question.
This site is the opposite bet. It is static HTML with no advertising, no tracking scripts and no paywalled rankings. Every number on it comes from official birth registration data, and every page says where its numbers came from.
For each name we show the full national popularity curve since 1880, the counts behind it, where in the country the name is strongest, phonetically similar names, and middle names scored for how the combination reads aloud. Where we have researched the etymology, we give the root language and the literal sense, and we say when a meaning is disputed.
We do not invent meanings. A great many names in the American record are modern coinages, respellings or family names in first position, and they do not have an etymology in any real sense. Where that is the case the page shows the data and says nothing more. Inventing a Hebrew root for a name first recorded in Ohio in 1994 would be easy and dishonest.
The site covers the United States today. European statistical offices publish comparable data and those countries are being added, starting with the United Kingdom and Ireland.