This tool works best on names that experience flash-in-the-pan popularity. Take the name "Pam". About a third of all Pams were born between 1959 and 1961. And two thirds were between 1957 and 1964. There just aren't that many Pams before or after that time period. The Eighties name Sheena or the 2010s Khloe were equally fashionable – until they weren't! 

In contrast, names like Michael or Elizabeth have been consistently popular through time, which makes narrowing down the a person's date of birth (i.e. year) much more difficult.

Female names experience more variation over time than male names. It’s another way of saying that parents uses more creativity when naming baby girls than boys. 

As a result, we track only 500 or so boy names and almost 700 girl names. For our tables, we only list a name if it was in the top 200 (boys and girls are separate) in at least 1 decade from the 1880's to 2010's (granted, it's an admittedly-arbitrary cutoff)!

These results are adjusted for life expectancy. For instance, while there were more Adolphs born pre-World War II than afterwards, Hitler's contemporaries would be about 130 years old by now (needless to say, that generation has all died out).

These names were taken from the United States, but should be similar in most English-speaking countries. Detailed records from the Social Security Administration start in 1880.

The source data ends in 2021 (future updates are possible). Therefore, names that were popular in those years may experience unreliable results, depending on the popularity in future years.

This tool doesn't merge different spelling variations of the same name. For example, Adriana and Adrianna are treated as different entries.

Unisex names like Alexis, Jackie, Robin, Jessie or Dana are treated as two different entries, depending on the gender of the baby. This decision was premised on the assumption that people guessing the year of birth would know whether their target was male or female.

The first 3 columns feature the top 3 results, and their probability. The last column calculates the odds the top 3 years include the person's actual date of birth. The higher the percentage, the easier it is to guess a person's age from their first name. 

Read Like: Of all the [insert name here] currently alive in the United States, [X]% were born in [Y1], [Y2] or [Y3].

The name Suri was only used 16 times before Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise chose it for their daughters' name. In 2016, suddenly there were 184 Suris. Similarly, Kalel went from 70 uses in 2005 (the year Nicolas Cage's son was born) to 161 in 2006.