Old Man Name Generator

How this list was compiled: A list by a written rule, computed on 3 October 2026 from the Social Security Administration's national file of first names on US birth records (names.zip, linked from https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/limits.html, years 1880 to 2025; ssa.gov refuses scripted downloads, so the official zip was read from the Internet Archive's copy captured 2026-09-18, https://web.archive.org/web/20260918154125/https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/names.zip, 7,860,026 bytes). For each of the 14 decades from the 1880s to the 2010s the births of every name were added up for girls and for boys, and the names of each sex were ranked by that sum, ties in alphabetical order. A name is listed for a sex when four things hold: its best rank in any decade is 350 or better; that best decade is the 1930s or earlier; more babies of that sex than of the other got the name in that decade; and the name is outside that sex's 1,000 most-given names of 2025, the newest year in the file. That leaves 460 names: 209 for men and 252 for women, 1 of them for both. Two names the rule would list are left out by hand because they are also crude words. Best decade is the decade of the best rank, the earlier one if two tie. The first rule was the top 200 of a decade; it was widened to 350 so that the list stays its own beside the site's other name lists. The decade sums were compared that day with the 2,800 decade ranks and counts on this site's book character name page, which were taken from the administration's own decade tables (https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/): every row of the 1880s to the 1930s agrees, and the only two that differ are in the 2000s. The file lists a name only in a year when at least 5 babies of that sex got it, and counts every spelling as its own name. Counts come from Social Security card applications; many people born before 1937 never applied for a card, so the early decades are incomplete (https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/background.html). The file gives no ages: a name is called old here only because its best decade is at least 85 years back. Licence: Public domain: the file is a work of the US federal government, which copyright does not cover (17 U.S.C. 105). The rule, the decade sums and the ranks are our own work.