Baby names of 2006

Emily and Jacob topped the lists in 2006, out of 3,956,482 births recorded across 31,651 different names. That is 2.9% more than the 2005 files hold. About 3.9 million of them are alive today.

Source: US Social Security Administration national baby-name files. Names given to fewer than five babies in a year are not published, so the totals here run below the true number of births. How far below is not the same in every year: the files hold 201,484 births for 1880 and 3,315,343 for 2025, so a change from one year to the next in the early decades is partly a change in what the record covers.