Preposterous Universe

 
Trendy

TigerHawk points to another one of those 0nly-on-the-internet cool things: the NameVoyager, which allows you to find out the relative popularity of different names given to children since the year 1900. Even better, it plots the frequencies of all names that begin with the letters you've entered, so that you can see which first letters are most popular. The amount of fluctuation in names is really quite impressive. One interesting thing his how we've recently become infatuated with exotic-sounding names, as evidenced by the zoom in popularity of names beginning with letters like "Q", "X", and "Z":

Of course, the Z demographic is dominated by Zachary, which points to another trend towards solid Old Testament names: Joshua, Isaiah, and Hannah have all seen surges in popularity. No sign of Jezebel or Baal, though.

~ posted by Sean Carroll at 8:20 AM ~ link ~ ~ ~