The meteoric rise of boys’ names ending in ‘n’

It’s been noted before that one of the most striking trends when analyzing American baby names is the rise in popularity of boys’ names ending with the letter ‘n’ over the past few decades. What I haven’t seen is a visualization that truly demonstrates the scale of this phenomenon. And for a good reason; it’s difficult to show trends over time in 26 variables. So I made this animated GIF of bar graphs; pay attention to the ‘n’ after the mid-70s.

I was also interested in the trends for each letter; in the GIF above, there’s a rise and a fall of names ending in “d” (although the rise ends in the mid-1930s, which I’ve already explained is problematic due to the way data was collected). So here’s a grid of every letter; the scales are not the same (“n” is far more popular than “q”, for example) so I’ve shaded each one so that darker green goes along with most popularity, and the overall trends of each one can be seen:

There’s still more that can done with this data; only since 2011 have as many as four of the top ten boys’ names ended in ‘n’, so evidently this is a phenomenon that has carried through more than the top tier of popularity; it would be interesting to see the contributions of different names. I also wonder what some of the peaks and valleys for other names represent, and of course one could always do the same analysis to the last letters of girls’ names (let me guess: lots of “a”s), the first letters of either sex, and even middle letters or multi-letter patterns. More to come, unless some other shiny data bauble catches my eye first…