Every number on Natre traces back to official US Social Security records
Natre is built on the Social Security Administration's public baby-name dataset: per-year, per-sex birth counts for every first name on US Social Security card applications, from 1880 through 2024 — about 2.1 million records covering 100,000+ unique names. State-level pages use the SSA's companion per-state files. For privacy, the SSA only includes names given to 5 or more babies of one sex in a year; names below that threshold do not appear anywhere, including here.
Ranks are computed directly from birth counts — #1 means the most babies that year. Unisex names are ranked separately for girls and boys. Trend reports compare consecutive years' ranks; "debuts" are names appearing in the records for the first time ever; gender labels reflect the historical share of births ("unisex" means neither sex exceeds 80%). Syllable counts and sound groupings are estimated from spelling. No survey data, no extrapolation — if we show a number, it is counted, not modeled.
The SSA publishes each year's data the following May. Natre currently reflects the 2024 release; the 2025 data will appear here within days of the SSA's May 2026 publication.
Coverage before ~1937 undercounts births (Social Security numbers weren't universal at birth); the earliest decades skew toward people who later applied for cards. Spelling variants are separate names (Sophia and Sofia are ranked independently). Territory and abroad births follow SSA's own inclusion rules.
Everything on Natre is free to cite with a link to the page you reference. A few findings from the current data:
Machine-readable extracts: the extinction list (CSV) · daily feed (RSS) · embeddable charts.