Flash names site - forgotten!

December 8, 2005 12:18 PM

Anyone remember a great interactive "naming" site, run in flash I think, where you could see how popular or not a name was over a period of time (even by country I think)? I have searched, I promise - but I just can't find it!
posted by dash_slot- to society & culture (9 comments total)

Here you go.
posted by nixxon at 12:21 PM on December 8, 2005

http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html
posted by captainscared at 12:21 PM on December 8, 2005

The Popular Baby Names section of the Social Security web site is more useful. It's also the source cited for the flash gizmo.
posted by mmdei at 12:30 PM on December 8, 2005

The Name Voyager is actually a Java app(let), BTW.
posted by misterbrandt at 1:04 PM on December 8, 2005

Also: http://www.thinkbabynames.com/
posted by Skot at 1:15 PM on December 8, 2005

The baby name wizard is the one, thanks all.

I wanted to use it to see what names were popular for a given year or decade (say, 1959/1950's) but I don't think it does that.

Cheers again.
posted by dash_slot- at 3:14 PM on December 8, 2005

Dash: my link provides the answer to that question. Perhaps you missed the lower-right bow titled "Top 1000 names by decade"

Or, if you'd like to mine more specific data, that option is available as well.
posted by mmdei at 3:22 PM on December 8, 2005

O - thanks mmdei. It is useful an'all, it was a different thing to what I was looking for, but it does what I requested. Ta.
posted by dash_slot- at 3:42 PM on December 8, 2005

There's also Parenting.com's "Name-O-Meter"—also based on the SSA data, it preceded the "NameVoyager" by several years, and was coded by (ahem) me. It was MeFi'ed at the time, and has now been folded into their Baby Namer tool.

I think iVillage must have bought the NameVoyager thing, because I'm pretty sure that when I first came across it, it was just some guy's independent project.

By the way, the SSA data has some questionable shit going on, because it's based on forms filled out by, well, the American public, and entered into a database by, well, the people the SSA hires to enter things into databases. So you have a significant number of boys named Jennifer, for instance. There are also a ton of cases where just the first initial was entered—kids allegedly named "B" or "Q"—although it looks like we managed to filter those out of searches on the Parenting site.
posted by staggernation at 4:37 PM on December 8, 2005