We're just eight days into he new year and the nice people at Births, Deaths and Marriages Victoria have already released the complete list of baby names used in the state of Victoria in 2012.
For those of you not familiar with Australia, Victoria is a small state in the South East of Australia. It's capital city is Melbourne (where I live!) and the state population as of March 2012 was 5,603,100.
The list of names from 2012 doesn't actually reach 1000 names, due to our smaller population. Instead we had 697 girl names and 650 boys names on the charts, which only counted names given to more than 5 children. So I thought I'd have a quick recap of the top, middle and rarest names from 2012 for Victoria.
Our top 10 favourite names for 2012 were:
Olivia Jack
Ruby William
Mia Oliver
Emily Ethan
Amelia Thomas
Sophie Noah
Ava James
Zoe Lucas
Isabella Joshua
Sienna Alexander
Past the top 10, I thought I'd look at names that were "middle of the field" - that is, given to approximately half as many children as the top name was. Surprisingly, these names were not positioned at 100, 200 or 300 out of 600 or so. For the girls, Grace was "middle of the field", yet she is only position #13! Out of 697! It's a similar story with the boys, with "middle of the field" names Harry and Henry positioned at #22 and #23 out of 650.
Our pre-occupation with choosing "different" and "special" names for our children means that the field is much more spread out, and our choices more diverse. For both boys and girls, about a third of the names on the list were given to just 6-10 children. A selection of some of the interesting names that fall into this category include:
Aditi Hector
Alkali Jovan
Amina Koda
Eadie Lucian
Inara Maxim
Mahlia Novak
Portia Oakley
Samira Odin
Tayah Tarkyn
Zahlee Willem
Almost just as fun was looking for the names that weren't listed. And I must admit a small sense of joy at the fact that some of my secret (and not so secret) top picks weren't there.
Wow you didn't waste any time! Great job!
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing to realise that by #13 on the list, you are already at around half of #1. In other words, once beyond the Top 20, any name you pick isn't actually going to be terrifically popular.
As I read birth notices all the time, and mostly from Victoria, I was interested to see how my experience tallied with reality.
I'm sure I saw a BA for almost every Mietta registered, yet I didn't see a single Mohammad, which is fairly well used.
And I feel as if I saw quite a few Oakleys, Tayahs and Willems overall, even though only a few were born in one state.
I used to think I saw maybe 5-10% of each name in real life; now I know it's very uneven. I probably see 90% of some names, 50% of others, 20% of others, and 0% of many names in BAs. So birth notices aren't a very accurate way to get an idea of how popular a name is.
I know what you mean - I think I also get so used to readings the cool birth announcement names on For Real Baby Names that I get a slightly skewed impression of what names are being used most often. Especially since they cover international names too :)
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