Most Popular Names of the 1940's

This page presents the top 1000 given names for births in the 1940's. The data comes from a 5% sampling of Social Security card applications with dates of birth from January 1940 through December 1949.

All names which occurred at least five times in the sample are included in the table below. The total number of males in the sample is 808,249 and the total number of females is 765,232. Criteria to be included in the sample is simply that a Social Security card application was filed, that the year of birth was between 1940 and 1949, and that the birth was on US soil. As always each unique spelling is considered a unique name. It may be appropriate for purposes of ranking popularity of names to combine similar spellings of the same name. This kind of grouping, however, is subjective and time consuming, and is beyond the scope of this document. The 2000 edition of the World Almanac lists the top 10 names of each decade based on this data after combining different spellings of the same name.

No effort has been made to edit the data and as a result some coding errors are obvious. For example initials like "A" are included in the lists. Another common problem, especially for the earlier decades is females coded as being male. For example Mary is the ranked 491 among male names. Finally entries like "Unknown" and "Baby" are not removed from the lists.