names

[mmcirvin]

Via Sean Carroll: NameVoyager (Java) is kind of fun, purporting to plot the relative popularity of baby names over the past century (you can type in the upper left to restrict the first letters).

Sean actually posted a screenshot of "Q", which interested me because Sam's cousin's name, Quinton, is far more popular than I realized: I thought it was a peculiar variant spelling of Quentin, but it's actually been almost as popular as Quentin for the past few decades, and seems to have risen and fallen nearly proportionally with Quentin throughout the century.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

One striking pattern is that whole initial letters, or sets of initial letters, go through periods of fashion. All of the vowels start out relatively popular at the beginning of the 20th century, dwindle around 1940 to 1960, and then explode again toward century's end. The hardest consonants show the opposite pattern, peaking sometime in 1940-1960 and then dropping, though a few of them like K peak a little later.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...This is, obviously, a US-only database.