Evelyn, Oliver, George? Search our dataset to find out how popular your name has been in the last 100 years
If you think there are a lot of children around with names that sound like they’re from your grandmother’s era, you’re not wrong.
A Guardian Australia analysis of trends in Australian baby names shows a recent resurgence in some names from the early 1900s, such as Josephine, Evelyn and George. But when you look at data going back to the 1930s, you can see how much Australia has changed.
Oliver, Jack and Charlotte have been some of the most popular baby names in Australia over the past decade, but the diversity of names is increasing.
As a result, the most popular names are not as dominant as they used to be. Despite a growing population, over the past decade about half as many children each year were named Oliver as were named Peter in the 1960s, for example.
In the following chart, you can see the popularity of each name over time (by default showing only the top 50). You can also search the data to see names from the entire dataset. There isn’t a national dataset of baby names by year, so Guardian Australia had to cobble together datasets from states and territories, which only publish the top 100 names in each year.
Popularity of baby names over time
Initially shows the top 50 most popular names in the dataset. Use the search to investigate all the names in our dataset
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Notes: Shows names as a percentage of all children with that name in each year. Based on the most popular baby names in each state and territory. Similar sounding names or alternative spellings have not been combined. Guardian graphic | Sources: South Australian, New South Wales, Victorian, Tasmanian, Northern Territory, West Australian and Queensland governments
The most popular names in our dataset are largely drawn from the Hebrew Bible, with Michael, David, Sarah and Jessica topping the list. There also appear to be few names from a non-European origin in the data, with Mohammed one of the exceptions.
Many of the most popular names in the dataset peaked in the 1980s and 90s. Some peaked even earlier than that, like David and Michael in the 50s and 60s. Oliver is the most popular boys’ name over the past 10 years but just 62nd since the 1930s.
While most of these names have since trailed off significantly, some, like Alice and Edward, have had a resurgence. But even many of these have not reached the same level of popularity they once enjoyed.
You can further explore the top names since the 1930s in the table below. The table also splits names by male and female – the gender is taken from features in the state births, deaths and marriages data. There were thousands of unique names (or variations on names) in our dataset, so we’ve had to restrict it to just the top thousand:
Notes:
We don’t have good data on names that had lower numbers overall but were consistently popular among some communities. If a name was consistently the 101st most popular, for instance, it could very well be one of the most popular over the past 90 years. But it won’t appear in our dataset.
