Most Popular Baby Names for 2006

Every year around Mother's Day the US Social Security Administration reports on the most popular baby names for the previous year.

Based on more than 4.2 million Social Security card applications for children born last year, mothers and fathers have picked Emily and Jacob as the most popular baby names for the eighth year in a row.

Emily has been the most popular female name each year since 1996. Jacob has been the top male name since 1999. Sophia is new to the top ten for the first time and William returns after a one year absence.

There are a variety of factors that go into the names that parents choose for their newborns. According to the Wall Street Journal, many people aspire for themselves -- or their offspring -- to command prominent placement in the top few links on search engines or social networking sites' member lookup functions. But, as more people flood the Web, that's becoming an especially tall order for those with common names.

What's interesting about these reports is that you can find the ranking of the names for a given year, but what is also interesting is the absolute popularity of the different names.

For instance, Michael was the second most popular boy's name in 2006, and was the most popular name for decades from the 1950's to the 1990's. That ranking masks, however, the fact that the actual number of new babies named Michael has decreased from 65,246 in 1990 to 23,324 in 2006. This is indicative of an overall trend of parents getting more diverse with their name choices, perhaps in search of more uniqueness.

On the girls side, Emily, while maintaining its position as the most popular girl's name has decreased from 26,524 babies in 1999 to 21,118 in 2006.




Michael Saunders has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He edits a site on Popular Baby Names and maintains a Free List of Baby Girl Names.