Everything is Miscellaneous

The long tail of baby names

May 11th, 2008 by

Parade magazine today reports on the top ten names for baby boys and girls this year:

Ok, but I seem to meet more and more kids with one-off names. Isn’t the long tail of names getting longer every year?

on 04 Jun 2008 at 3:04 pm1 Commissaresse 2.0 » Blog Archive » Baby’s uit de lange staart

[…] Weinbergers Everything is miscellaneous. Omdat hij leuk denkt. Zo linkte hij onlangs de huidige diversiteit aan voornamen aan de alomtegenwoordige lange […]
on 22 Jul 2008 at 10:09 am2 Tom

The long tail of names is getting longer. You can see the top names commanding less presence over the recent decades: http://www.babynamespedia.com/top100/m
on 23 Jul 2008 at 11:43 am3 Jesse

Very interesting chart Tom. There was more long-tail action back in 1930’s than today.

And it’s surprising how the trend toward conformity seems to have accelerated from the mid-60’s through to 1984. My first guess is that’s the pop culture influence of television. Wonder if it was cable & the VCR that reversed the trend in the mid-80s?