The impending loss of my unique name

I’m the only Simon I personally know. There are lots of others, and even plenty of Simon King’s, but in my immediate world I’m the only one. My friends have never had to use modifiers or nicknames to distinguish me the way they do Josh’s or John’s. That might change soon since it seems my name is becoming popular.

According to The Baby Name Wizard the hot new names abroad include Oliver, Hugo, and Simon. It’s only a matter of time before American couples copy the European trend and then where am I? Without a unique last name to hold me up I’ll be a regular Joe Smith.

In all serious though the Baby Wizard site has an amazing piece of information design where you can visually see the trends in names throughout the last century. It breaks down usage by male and female which allows you to see when certain names like Meredith switch from one sex to another.

Popularity trends for the names Simon and Simone over the last 100 years

It’s a lot of fun to play with, but be warned that it’s a Java applet so you’ll need the latest version of Java installed in your browser and it might take a while to load. Once it does though it’s quite speedy.

Found via stevenberlinjohnson.com

View Comments (8)

# February 15, 2005 04:49 PM

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I’m the quite the opposite. Got the rare last name but the not so unique first name. I’m curious what exactly governs these trends initially. The only thing that comes to mind is celebrity popularity. I’d like to think that is not type dissertion we use name our children. I’m sure that later on the popularity of a name is due to a snowball affect. I can only imagine the slope on the Ashton stats for the past few years.

Posted by: Josh Franta on February 16, 2005 10:45 AM

You need a unique last name to balance the increasingly common Simon? This is where Smart-King comes in! Lately, I like the symmetry of my own name.

Posted by: Andrea Swalec on February 16, 2005 12:16 PM

I think that celebrity popularity can cause the increase, but it also seems to cause decreases depending on who it is. Check out how Adolf drops instantly in the 1930s or now Gigi spikes and falls just as quick. So interesting. You can also surmise information about immigration trends, for example the amount of people named Muhammad starting in the 70s. I’d be neat to see this data for other countries since this system is very US centric.

Posted by: Simon on February 16, 2005 1:07 PM

i love your name. the combination will still be rare.

Posted by: jim on February 16, 2005 3:25 PM

Bring it King! You stole all of my interesting tidbits that I was going to post. This is where the living together and sharing is bad. Stay away from my writing collection sneaky.

Posted by: meredith on February 16, 2005 4:41 PM

OMG! My name ranks even more popular than Simon?! That’s sad news. And I’ve only ever met a handful of Miguels my whole life — even in S. America!

Posted by: miguel on February 19, 2005 3:23 AM

the high point for Meredith was ranking 156 out of the top 1,000 names. Now it is back down being 351 most popular. Yow!

Posted by: meredith on February 22, 2005 11:59 PM

Meredith…..really he stole your post……when was your last post?

Posted by: gig on February 24, 2005 5:45 PM

As Far As I Can Tell

The impending loss of my unique name

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