About 9BabyNames
9BabyNames is an independent baby-naming research site covering 19,862 names, 146 years of US Social Security Administration popularity history (1880–2025), and 799 in-depth naming guides. Free to use. Free to cite. No accounts required.
Who Runs This Site
9BabyNames is run by Marvin Tang — a software engineer who has been building name-research websites since the early 2010s. The site is small, independent, and not part of any larger publisher. There's no editorial board, no investor pressure, and no quota for daily content. The decisions about what to publish (and what not to) are made by one person reading their email.
You can reach me directly at [email protected]. I respond to corrections, suggestions, data inquiries, and press requests personally. There is no support ticket system. No chatbot.
What Makes 9BabyNames Different
Most baby-name sites are dictionaries — they tell you what a name means and roughly where it comes from, and that's it. 9BabyNames is built around three additional commitments:
- Real popularity data, not estimates. The popularity history on every name page is sourced directly from the US Social Security Administration's public-domain dataset. We have 65,411 rows covering 146 consecutive years (1880–2025). When the chart on a name page shows "Linda peaked in 1947 at 99,693 babies," that's a real federal record, not a guess. Our Methodology page documents exactly how the data is sourced, what its limitations are, and how to verify any number on the site.
- Original research, not just listicles. We publish multi-source research reports analyzing baby-naming trends — what's rising, what's falling, what each decade's "fingerprint" names look like, how cultural events translate into name spikes. Each report is human-written, fact-checked against the SSA dataset, and free to cite with attribution. The reports live in our Reports & Research hub.
- Honesty about what we don't know. If a name's etymology is uncertain, we say so. If the SSA dataset suppresses occurrences (it does — names with fewer than 5 occurrences in a year are withheld for privacy), we explain it. If something in our database is wrong, we want to hear about it. Most baby-name sites paper over this kind of uncertainty with confident-sounding boilerplate; we'd rather be useful than authoritative-sounding.
What You'll Find Here
- 19,862 baby names with meanings, origins, gender, and (where known) pronunciations.
- 65,411 SSA popularity records rendered as year-by-year charts on every matching name page.
- 2,999 famous-people biographical entries cross-referenced to names so you can see "real people who shared this name."
- 799 in-depth tips and guides covering naming traditions, cultural conventions, sibling-name pairing, sound symbolism, and how a name's popularity shapes how it's perceived.
- Curated collections — by origin (Irish, Hebrew, Japanese, Arabic, etc.), by meaning (Strong, Light, Love, etc.), by letter, and by theme.
- Naming tools — generator, random picker, birthday-based picker, A–Z dictionary, meaning search.
- Use a private naming workspace to save names, test full-name combinations, compare finalists, run a tournament, and invite a partner to react — no account required.
A Bit of History
9BabyNames started as a side project rooted in two observations: first, that baby-name resources online were either thin listicles or buried under popups; second, that there was an enormous amount of authoritative public data (the SSA dataset, government censuses, historical records) sitting unused while sites were generating fluff content instead. The site grew out of a desire to make a calmer, more thoughtful place to research names — one that respected both the user's time and the underlying data.
The site has been ad-supported since the start. We display a small number of contextual ads through Google AdSense to cover hosting and data-acquisition costs. We don't sell user data, we don't require accounts, and we don't run email harvesting funnels. Your shortlist starts in your browser; it reaches our server only if you choose a partner link or one-time email restore. You can use the core workspace without giving us an email address.
Editorial Standards
- Verifiability over volume. If we publish a popularity number, you can trace it to a specific row in the SSA dataset. If we publish an etymology, we cite the source.
- No fabricated examples. "Famous people named X" lists pull from our curated 2,999-row biographical database, not from invented entries. If we don't have famous-people records for a name, we say "no famous bearers in our database" rather than make some up.
- No silent rewrites. When research reports update, the version date changes, and historical findings stay traceable. We don't quietly change "X was #5 in 1900" to a different number a year later — past facts stay past facts.
- AI is a tool, not the author. Some of our long-form content is drafted with AI assistance, then fact-checked and rewritten by a human. We never publish unreviewed AI output, and we never invent examples or numbers to fill space.
Our App
We also publish an iOS app, Baby Names Expert — browse all 19,862+ baby names completely offline, save favorites, attach personal notes, and use the built-in name generator, right on your phone. No ads, no tracking, no account required. Learn more on the Baby Names Expert App page.
Feedback, Corrections, Suggestions
We rely on readers — especially parents and researchers with deep knowledge of their own cultural and linguistic traditions — to catch errors and suggest additions. If you spot a wrong meaning, a questionable origin, a pronunciation that's off, or a name that should be in a collection, please tell us. We read every message and update the database regularly.
Reach me via the Contact page or directly at [email protected].
Author: Marvin Tang · Last updated: October 2026 · Independent publisher.
Citation: Tang, M. (2026). About 9BabyNames. 9BabyNames. https://9babynames.com/about