Book Profile
The 2014 Baby Names Almanac
An almanac-style guide that reads the cultural tea leaves of pop culture, celebrity, royalty, and media to forecast which baby names are rising, falling, and worth choosing, paired with a dictionary of more than 20,000 names.
Get the book →Modeled on The Old Farmer's Almanac, The 2014 Baby Names Almanac turns the stressful task of naming a baby into something fun and data-informed. Drawing on the latest Social Security Administration rankings, it analyzes the freshest trends—military ranks like Major, presidential surnames, place names, literary and TV-inspired monikers (Game of Thrones, Downton Abbey, Twilight), color and nature names, and the celebrity-baby effect—then offers forecasts about who you'll meet on the playground next. It explains how popularity actually works (the top name covers a surprisingly small share of births), how spelling variations fragment the lists, and how to take any trend and personalize it. Capped by a browsable dictionary of over 20,000 girls' and boys' names with meanings, origins, and variant spellings, it is a one-stop snapshot of baby naming now and a practical toolkit for choosing a name you'll love.
What it argues
An implicit model in which cultural exposure events (celebrities, royalty, media, sports) and name attributes (distinctiveness, spelling fragmentation, gender-skew) drive parental name preferences, which in turn produce measurable changes in a name's popularity ranking and share of births.
Key ideas it contributes
- Cultural Exposure Event — A salient pop-culture occurrence—celebrity baby, royal birth, hit TV show, film, song, or sports victory—that brings a particular name into widespread public awareness during a given period.
- Name Distinctiveness — The degree to which a name is perceived as uncommon, off-the-beaten-path, or unique relative to currently popular names, which the book identifies as an increasingly valued attribute for parents.
- Spelling Variation Fragmentation — The extent to which a single underlying name is spread across multiple spelling variants, dispersing births across many list entries and obscuring a name's true aggregate popularity.
- Parental Name Preference — The aggregate inclination of expecting parents to favor a particular name, formed by cultural exposure, perceived distinctiveness, meaning, sound, and gender associations, and expressed in actual naming choices.
- Name Popularity Change — The observable year-over-year movement in a name's SSA rank and its share of all births, including new entries to and exits from the top 100 and top 1,000 lists.
- Gender Association Skew — The degree to which a gender-neutral name is used more often for one sex than the other, affecting how parents perceive and select it for a son or daughter.