Most popular baby names in the 21st century

What is in a name? Though neither Romeo nor Juliet can claim a spot on any lists of the most popular baby names of the 21st century in the U.S., this collection has a little bit of everything. There are reimagined surnames, Puritan virtue names, and names born from rom-coms, sitcoms, and dreamed up by Shakespeare himself.

Each year, the Social Security Administration annually gathers and analyzes name data, offering tremendous insight into past and present time periods; thus, we are able to get a glimpse into those cultural connections and trends that influenced the naming of our parents, grandparents, and so on. Maybe this doesn’t entirely explain why we refer to certain first names (Ethel, Beatrice, Clarence) as sounding “old-fashioned” or "old” for a baby, though it at least shows the first-choice names in the previous century when our families’ older generations were growing up.

Today, “vintage” and “retro”—equal parts uncomplicated response to an increasingly complicated, connected society and proof that what’s classic and simple prevails—is truly en vogue in sectors like fashion, home music listening, and mobile phones. Well, names are similar. In data released in December 2019, the SSA’s most popular names of the 2010s still included timeless, transcendent favorites like Noah, Sophia, Elijah, and Olivia.

For this particular list, Stacker brought together a wider range of data provided by the Social Security Administration, ranking each entry by the total number of American babies given a certain name in the 21st century. The list’s data is split up by birth gender, as reported on the baby’s Social Security card application.

As the list shows, the era of Tom, Dick, and Harry is mostly gone. Instead, fascinating names (and traditional ones) populate the most popular baby names in the 21st century; though celebrity babies help boost a name’s popularity, Blue Ivy, Suri, or Apple have yet to crack the list.

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