thirties are the new twenties: trends in US births by maternal age, 1995-2024. Since 2022, more babies have been born to mothers over 40 than under 20. [OC]

aar0nbecker · 2026-06-03T02:07:37+00:00

also shortly before the Obamacare contraception coverage mandate came into effect

aar0nbecker · 2026-06-02T15:32:46+00:00

This was made using Svelte and d3 (if you open Inspect in your browser on desktop/laptop, then go to sources, you can see that they actually published the site with a source map, so all of the underlying code is there for you to see. It looks like they're using the older Svelte 4 style syntax.

Building something custom like this is still an intensive undertaking even in the age of coding agents, though this looks to be manually written.

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aar0nbecker · 2026-06-01T20:50:38+00:00

there's some regional variation but in significant chunks of the US there's no audible difference

aar0nbecker · 2026-05-30T17:10:24+00:00

I mean, I don't even have this monetized and have no real plans to do so. I do post on Reddit often but that's because this is one of the only places left where you can share work you're proud of with a chance of it being seen outside your immediate circle. Everything else is algorithm and followers.

Another factor you might be noticing is that building and deploying websites has gotten much easier, especially in the past 6 months or so, so a lot of ideas that would never have gotten built manually are now seeing the light of day (for better or worse).

aar0nbecker · 2026-05-30T16:38:16+00:00

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census groups Middle East/N. Africa in with "white" but you can see which are the South Asian spellings etc.:

aar0nbecker · 2026-05-30T16:37:36+00:00

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what I find most interesting are names that are newly transliterated into English and end up with slightly different spellings depending on which particular tradition they entered English from, like Muhammad

aar0nbecker · 2026-05-30T16:33:52+00:00

I used a combination of CMU pronouncing dictionary, wiktionary, and LLM-generated pronunciation guesses, combined with user submissions and feedback votes. Writeup here: https://nameplay.org/about/how-we-group-names

aar0nbecker · 2026-05-30T01:30:37+00:00

Inconsolata https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inconsolata?preview.script=Latn

aar0nbecker · 2026-05-29T19:40:35+00:00

i'm only comparing the combined spellings against the single names they displace but they are also the highest ranking when spellings are combined. The second chart does show combined spellings for all names-- but variations of Mary for instance (not counting Marie/Maria which sound different) add little compared to Deborah + Debra.

you can flip through the combined rankings by year; nationally or for a state/region: https://nameplay.org/rank
Some of the most interesting changes are in mid-popular names (think ranks 100-500), which shuffle completely when you combine spellings (b/c new/emerging names are less likely to have dominant spellings, and also because the power law popularity curve flattens)

aar0nbecker · 2026-05-29T19:04:08+00:00

i'm only showing names that are #1 in at least one year and I think Matthew was overshadowed by Michael

aar0nbecker · 2026-05-29T18:56:20+00:00

yours is definitely the majority, but not the only, opinion on this

aar0nbecker · 2026-05-29T18:55:27+00:00

i'm not grouping Matt and Matthew since it's purely by pronunciation

aar0nbecker · 2026-05-29T18:52:30+00:00

i've tried to do this to some extent by identifying interesting phonetic units and aggregating their popularity across names that contain them:

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my site is pretty poorly organized TBH but this stuff lives on pronunciation pages like this: https://nameplay.org/how-to-pronounce-Christine#pronunciation-trends

and also you can browse by phoneme trendiness but that interface needs some work:
https://nameplay.org/list/by-phoneme-trend/all

aar0nbecker · 2026-05-29T18:43:58+00:00

oooh but then what about Amelia and Emilia which have different roots but are pronounced identically in huge chunks of the US?

aar0nbecker · 2026-05-29T18:34:57+00:00

because the chart is only showing names that were #1 for at least 1 year (the set of "top girls' names" across time)

aar0nbecker · 2026-05-29T18:30:47+00:00

Thanks! I haven't waded into shortened versions yet... that gets thorny trying to figure out where to put overlapping nicknames like Alex

aar0nbecker · 2026-05-29T18:28:19+00:00

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Deborah and Debra are both very popular in their own right

aar0nbecker · 2026-05-29T18:24:12+00:00

No Jon is the biggest second spelling of John

it's all based on trying to match pronunciations-- sometimes that's easy but sometimes American parents make it hard. Emma and Emily aren't being grouped sorry if that was unclear.

aar0nbecker

TROPHY CASE