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.

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.