john & mary, meet jacob & emily

Wow, this is an amazing thing. Name Voyager, a visualization tool that shows the rank of the top 1000 baby names over the last century. I love the progressive refinement that happens when you type in a name, one letter at a time. Lots of interesting things to discover here, in a clever and responsive design that encourages exploration. For example, check out names that start with the vowels (a, e, i, o, u) -- they were relatively popular in the early and late parts of the century, but not at all popular in the middle decades (signalling a postwar affinity for solid, pragmatic, consonant-based names???). Also, it seems that after years of obscurity q, x, and z will finally get their day here in the 21st century. Completely fascinating, almost makes me want to have a new baby to name.

Ah, and there's the baby name wizard blog as well. With all this word-of-net support, I bet the book sells like hotcakes.

[via Steven Berlin Johnson]