Name discovery tool · source-aware
Baby Boy Names by Year
Browse the 1,000 leading published U.S. boy-name spellings in each SSA birth year from 1880 through 2025. Compare exact counts and calculated year-to-year positions.
01 · Choose your filters
Set your course.
Choose a year and explore up to 1,000 published boy-name spellings, one hundred at a time. See the actual number of recorded births and how a spelling moved from the prior year.
Inputs are processed by our generation service. They are not added to a public name bank.
Keep the good ones
Your shortlist
Your saved names will appear here.
Saved only in this browser until you clear the list.
02 · Explore
Your results
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Practical guide
Make this tool useful.
Use the year, not just today’s list
A name in the 2025 leading group may have a long history, a recent climb, or an earlier peak. Change the year to see how the options looked in another cohort. The list is ordered by the published count for that year, not by a forecast of what will be popular next.
Narrow by initial without inventing a rank
The first-letter filter selects from the same top-1,000 source list. The displayed position remains its place among all published spellings in the male field, not a new rank among names beginning with your letter. Page through the filtered selection to see more.
Read change carefully
Our calculated position change compares the exact spelling with the previous year in the same field. A dash means there was no published prior row or no prior year in this archive. It does not mean nobody used the name. Raw counts also change with the size and coverage of annual birth cohorts.
Questions about this tool
Are these the only boy names used that year?
No. The page browses the first 1,000 names from each published SSA male-field file. Many more spellings may have published rows; small counts are suppressed.
Can a name also appear in the girls’ list?
Yes. The recorded-sex fields describe aggregate historical application records, not rules about who can use a name.
Read our data sources and selection rules before using a result as evidence of popularity.