How it works

The rating

We use an Elo system: every time you pick a name it takes points off the one you didn't pick — more if it was a surprise, fewer if it was expected. It is the same system chess players use, borrowed for something rather more cheerful.

This is how we rank the names — the rankings are entirely user-generated. The more head-to-heads a name has behind it, the less each new one moves it, so a flurry of votes can introduce a newcomer quickly but cannot drag an old favourite from the bottom to the top overnight.

Which names you get shown

A quarter of match-ups come from the top 40 names — we want our leaderboard to be stress-tested more than some of the more unique names in our database. The two names you get are usually close to each other in the rankings, so you are not just seeing the same names picked every time.

Filters, and what they mean

You can narrow your search using the filters on the voting page: girls or boys, US or UK, and a style band — Top 100, Popular, Rising, Fading, Revival or Rare. Each filter has been defined from official figures, not my own personal taste. Rising means a name climbed 50 or more places in the US last year; Revival means it peaked before 1970 and is back in the top 1,000; Rare means it is outside both current charts but was still given to at least 40 babies in its best year.

Every chip shows how many names it holds, and a combination too small for a real contest is greyed out rather than serving you the same pair repeatedly.

With no filter set, matchups are weighted by how often babies actually get each name, so about four cards in five are names you would recognise. Choose a band and that weighting is dropped — you asked for that slice, so you get it evenly.

UK movement carries a floor. ONS ranks every name down to three babies, and all of those share a single tie block — so a name going from three births to sixteen would appear to climb four thousand places. We only count UK movement for names given to at least fifty babies, where a rank change reflects real change in use rather than reshuffling at the bottom of the list.

Filtered rankings are ranked within that filter, not against the full field — the page says so when a filter is active.

Where the data comes from

Popularity figures are official. US ranks come from the Social Security Administration, which publishes the top 1,000 names per sex every year. UK figures come from the Office for National Statistics. Historic trend lines run back to 1880.

The rankings on this site are not official, and they are not a count of babies named. They are a record of which name parents go for when they choose one out of two. It is a user-generated list.

What the numbers can't do

Names need five head-to-heads before they show up in the rankings at all, and win rates are nudged towards 50% until a name has a proper record behind it. Otherwise a name that went 3–0 on its first afternoon would sit above one that has won 340 of 500.