Being a census of given names recorded at birth — every name entered five or more times in a year, from the war babies of 1917 to the class of 2024.
Write a first name below and watch its whole life: arrival, crest, decline. Some names ruled for generations. Most were given one wave — and never came back.
Girls in amber, boys in green — share of the year's registered births.
No trace of that name in the register — Ontario suppresses any name given fewer than five times in a year, so the rarest names never surface at all.
In 1935 the ten commonest girls' names covered a third of all girls born; parents drew from a shared well. From the late 1950s the well fractured. Concentration — measured the way economists measure market concentration, by the Herfindahl–Hirschman index — fell roughly tenfold, and the pool of names in circulation quadrupled.
Fig. 1 — HHI of name shares; higher means fewer names dominate
Fig. 2 — distinct names registered five or more times that year
Fig. 3 — Jensen–Shannon distance between consecutive years; higher means faster change
Each block is one name's uninterrupted hold on the top spot — touch any block, however narrow, to read it. Mary and Marie traded the girls' crown for half a century; Joseph held the boys' for twenty-two straight years. After 2000 the succession becomes a scramble, and today's monarchs rule a smaller kingdom: at her peak, Mary was given to one girl in thirteen; Olivia now claims one in eighty-nine.
Touch a block to read its reign.
Touch a block to read its reign.
The newest top tens — touch any line to trace its lifeline. And note the arrival no 1950s registrar would recognise: Muhammad, absent from the register before 1976, now stands ninth among Ontario's boys under a single spelling — and first across all six.
registered in 2024
registered in 2024