The universe is pregnant with invisible beauty waiting to be uncovered. Creative visualisation of abstract data reveals the innate beauty which permeates every aspect of our world. From the “poetry of logarithms” to the names we give our children…
I recently stumbled across Wordle: an online toy for generating beautiful “word clouds”. If you’re familiar with a tag cloud, you’re understand Wordle. Wordle was designed to be a way to visualise the semantic content of texts, giving greater prominence to words appearing more frequently. It’s been used to visualise everything from blogs to presidential speeches.
I thought it would be interesting to use Wordle to visualise the popularity of baby names using records from the Social Security Administration. With a dash of custom programming to tie it all together, hey presto: baby name word clouds.
These images visualise the popularity of the top 500 names for boys and girls based on the SSA’s data for 2007.
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- The top 500 boys names of 2007, arranged according to popularity.
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- The top 500 girls names of 2007, arranged according to popularity.
There are some interesting insights to be gleaned from comparing the images. For example, you will probably notice more definitive standouts among the girl names than the boys. That’s because the popularity of the top girls names is more concentrated around the top 10 names than is that of the boys names.
Our new baby name search engine was just released. You can use it to search for names based on recent and historical popularity, as well as many other attributes such as rhythmic stress patterns and associations. Check it out.
8 Responses to “The top 500 girl’s and boys names—visualised”
Hey - these are a great find - very beautiful, and strangely compelling. Really interesting to see the difference in prominence between the popular boys’ and popular girls’ names.
What else … ? Well, fonts and colour schemes for starters … the ‘boy’ wordle uses a neater font and more varied colours compared to the girls - makes the visual dimension both more integrated and more dynamic - the black background contributes to this as well. Did you make these choices when you generated the clouds?
I did the same for Dutch names (top 100 in 2008), thanks to your great idea!
Hey Emma. Thanks for stopping by. Nice work with your Dutch Wordle name-clouds. Where did you get the popularity data from?
What an awesome idea! This is a great way of visualizing just how much more popular Emily is than Lily, for example. I will definitely be linking to this entry when people ask about name popularity on Yahoo! Answers and such.
This is interesting for me as a teacher to see as well. The names that “stand out” more on this list are of course the ones I see coming through my classroom the most often. It gives such a good snapshot of what one’s child’s classmates are likely to be named.
Great blog! I loved the Wordle link…that’s the coolest thing I’ve seen for awhile.
Mind if I Blogroll your site?
Hey thanks Melian! I’m honoured to be blogrolled
I’ll be sure to check out your blog. Are you also the mind behind the Name Nerds website? or have I got mixed up?
i think this is the best name as its well known as a beauty trademark, and also it doesnt sound to common or too posh. and its not overused.
Hey, thanks for sharing this and other great stuff.
You and Emmy Jo are working really hard to bring cute & creative baby names to the world.
I checked out your baby name search tool, and I can tell you, its really good thing.
All the best and keep up the good work!