NameVoyager: track name popularity over time

This is really cool: NameVoyager is a web site that tracks the popularity of baby names over time. Type in a name, and get a “stripe” that changes in thickness to reflect the US Census data that reflects how popular that name was. For example, try “Hunter” (which spiked upward sharply starting in the mid-80s) or “Eugene”, which had its heyday in about 1919 and has been trending down ever since. Each name is also shown with its incidence per million babies; “Raphael” scores about 85 for 2003, while “Charles” hits right around 5,000 per million in the same year. Alas, “Rusty”, “Daisy”, and “Ibuprofen” are still pretty rare names. (The site has a pretty interesting companion blog, too.)