Baby Name Lab

The pronunciation-backed harmony, rhyme, and initials checks are available. SSA popularity and sound-based name discovery are temporarily unavailable because their pinned data sidecar is not present in this release.

SSA name data is not loaded in this release. Popularity, contained-name, and discovery controls are unavailable rather than returning misleading empty results. Sound checks still work for names covered by the pronunciation index.

Flags full rhymes (Aiden/Jayden), shared endings, shared first sounds, matching rhythm, and shared first letters. Letters A–Z only.

About the Baby Name Lab

Name popularity comes from the Social Security Administration's national “Popular Baby Names” file as pinned for this data build (v1/2026.07-lexical.6). Every count is the number of Social Security card applications recorded for a name/sex/birth-year combination. That is a recorded administrative fact — it is not a measure of a name's quality, meaning, or origin.

What the numbers mean

  • Counts are SSA-recorded card applications. SSA suppresses combinations with fewer than five applications in a year, so absence from a year does not mean zero births with that name.
  • Ranks are derived, not published. The source files contain no rank column; this build ranks each year and recorded sex by descending count, with equal counts sharing a rank.
  • Recent rank in Discover is the best derived rank inside the final decade of the pinned data, per recorded sex.
  • Coverage is national (state files are not included in this build), reflects names as SSA normalizes them (first letter capitalized, punctuation removed), is incomplete before 1937, and records sex only as the F/M of the source data.

Sound checks and their limits

  • Pronunciations come from the pinned CMUdict artifact — a general-purpose, primarily North American English dictionary. Many given names are not covered; the lab says so explicitly instead of guessing. A missing pronunciation says nothing about how a name is pronounced.
  • Harmony and rhyme checks compare each name's primary retained variant. Families pronounce names differently; treat flags as prompts, not verdicts.
  • The teasing audit lists dictionary-listed words sharing the name's rhyme sounds. It always runs in safe mode: words on this build's first-party caution list are counted (“N flagged”) but never displayed, and there is no switch to reveal them.
  • Result tiers are build-specific ranking bands from this data build, not universal usage claims, and large rhyme pools are scanned within a fixed budget (a truncation notice appears when that happens).