Pick a Random Boy Name: 1,213 US Names, Rising and Falling

How this list was compiled: Every name, birth count and rank is computed from the Social Security Administration's national baby names file (names.zip, linked from https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/limits.html), which data.gov lists as public domain with coverage from 1880 to 2025 (https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/baby-names-from-social-security-card-applications-national-data, checked 2026-09-18). ssa.gov refuses scripted downloads, so on 2026-09-19 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, files yob1880.txt to yob2025.txt plus the administration's readme). The 1,000 ranks for 2025 computed from it agree, name for name, with the copy of the administration's top 1,000 page at https://github.com/aruljohn/popular-baby-names (compared 2026-09-19). The list holds every name in the boys' top 1,000 for 2025 or for 2015: 1,213 names, of which 213 are new to the top 1,000 since 2015 and 213 have left it. 'Up 100 places or more' (178 names), 'Down 100 places or more' (241) and 'Within 100 places' (368) compare the 2015 and 2025 ranks of names that were in the top 1,000 in both years. Years in the top 1,000 counts the 146 yearly files from 1880 to 2025 in which the name ranks 1 to 1,000 among boys; 181 names are in all 146. Rank is a name's position among that sex's names for the year, as the readme defines it: names sorted by number of births, with ties in alphabetical order. The administration publishes ranks for the top 1,000 only, and below that hundreds of names tie on the same count, so a card prints a rank only inside the top 1,000 and prints the number of births otherwise. A name is listed only in years with at least 5 births, every spelling counts as its own name, and names are written with one capital letter (Mckenna, Mccoy). Counts come from Social Security card applications. The first cards were issued in mid-November 1936 (https://www.ssa.gov/history/ssn/firstcard.html), and the administration's background note says many people born before 1937 never applied for a card, so their names are not in the data (https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/background.html, data as of March 2026); both pages were read on 2026-09-19 from Internet Archive captures of 2026-09-09 and 2026-09-17. No meanings or origins are given, because the files carry none. Licence: Public domain: the file is a work of the US federal government, which copyright does not cover (17 U.S.C. 105, https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#105, checked 2026-09-19), and data.gov lists it as public domain (https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/baby-names-from-social-security-card-applications-national-data). The grouping is our own work.