We visited my family and one of my nieces is expecting a baby. Wondering what the name should be, we decided to consult the internet and had a whale of a time selecting a name for the new baby. I wondered if there is someone out there who would also like to know more about the meaning of names, and decided to post some of the better links that we found:

The most popular names

We found that a quite a few sites listed names by popularity. Wondering how the popularity was determined we set to investigate. Before giving the results of our findings, here is a list of the most popular boys names:

Jacob
Michael
Ethan
Joshua
Daniel
Christopher
Anthony
William
Matthew
Andrew

And girls names:

Emily
Isabella
Emma
Ava
Madison
Sophia
Olivia
Abigail
Hannah
Elizabeth

We found out that the names came from the American Social Security Administration who published the most popular names registered in America up to 2007. The results changed quite every year, and this means that the results is outdated and rather a of historical value and not a very good barometer of current naming trends.

There is quite a complete list of popular names for other countries at Wikipedia. Wikipedia being a humanly editable encyclopedia, the data could be very accurate, or not.

Baby name facts have further lists of popular names in different countries

Origin of names.

A super site with the meanings and origins of almost 50.000 names is the meaning of names. A database like this is not easy to search, but if you have some time it is worth it. to go through and search for meaning of names.

Another site with a very impressive database can be found at parentsconnect.