Did you know decade in which you were born can have a significant impact on your name? A list of baby names kept by the U.S. Social Security Administration, which dates all the way back to the 1880s, reveals how naming trends fluctuate over the decades.
According to records, if you were born in the 1950s, there’s a pretty good chance your name is either James or Mary. How about in the 1960s? Michael or Lisa might be on your birth certificate. Born in the 1970s? Michael, Christopher and Jennifer were the most popular names then.
To figure out names over the course of a generation, however, you’ll need to combine a few decades together. The website nameberry.com did just that in search of the most popular name for millennials, whose births were between 1982 and 2004. Nameberry then created a list of the top names for boys and girls and explained how many people have those names within the generation.
Take a look at the lists below:
Top 20 Millennial Names for Boys
1. Michael — 1,131,021
2. Christopher — 925,809
3. Matthew — 856,718
4. Joshua — 779,372
5. Daniel — 663,363
6. David — 649,402
7. Andrew — 629,809
8. James – 609,005
9. Joseph — 607,257
10. John — 581,023
11. Nicholas — 564,865
12. Ryan — 563,706
13. Jacob — 559,709
14. Brandon — 541,039
15. Justin — 530,206
16. Robert — 518,841
17. William — 516,650
18. Anthony — 490,498
19. Jonathan — 463,631
20. Tyler — 437,610
Top 20 Millennial Names for Girls
1. Jessica — 757,533
2. Ashley — 716,529
3. Amanda — 522,245
4. Sarah — 517,780
5. Jennifer — 514,385
6. Emily — 475,353
7. Samantha — 410,105
8. Elizabeth — 403,989
9. Stephanie — 360,574
10. Lauren — 342,725
11. Nicole — 341,634
12. Brittany — 341,515
13. Megan — 341,174
14. Rachel — 315,566
15. Hannah — 284,662
16. Kayla — 267,757
17. Melissa — 267,513
18. Amber — 267,392
19. Danielle — 247,517
20. Taylor — 241,847
Although Jacob became the most popular boy name in 1999, that change did little to move Michael from the overall most popular spot, with more than one million millennials sharing the name. Nameberry explained that Michael’s popularity is because it feels traditional and modern. It is kind of between more traditional names like Robert and modern names like Maverick.
As for the girls, Jessica’s popularity is a bit lower than the most popular boy’s name because it went up against Jennifer, which was slowly fading as a popular name right around the time millennials were being born.
Nameberry also compared the names on the list to “mom” and “dad” names of today, with Lauren, Nicole and Kayla showing up as “mom” names and Matthew, James, William, Ryan and Brandon being “dad” names. In other words, these names were common for millennials, but millennials are not passing those names along to their own children.
As for millennial names the website doesn’t expect to see many people naming babies for at least three more generations? Those are Tiffany, Brianna, Cody and Travis.
Interested to see the popularity of a name for a millennial you know? You can check out the top 100 names (including the ones on the lists above), here.