Popular & Unpopular First Letters for Baby Names – Girls Versus Boys

A reader named Wendy wrote to me a few weeks ago. She was wondering about my data on popular first letters for names — specifically, how the frequencies of first letters might differ by gender. One of her observations was:

I see that “J” is rated pretty highly, but I wonder if it [was] skewed for females due to the popularity of male names like Jack, Jake, Jacob, & John.

I thought this was an interesting idea, so I decided to analyze the first letters of male and female names separately.

Out of the 3,959 baby girl names that have ever ranked in the U.S. top 1,000 (1880-2006), the first letter used most often is M, followed by A and L:

Out of the 3,399 baby boy names that have ever ranked in the U.S. top 1,000 (1880-2006), the first letter used most often is A, followed by D and J:

These rankings lend some credence to Wendy’s theory about the letter J.

Here are the specifics:

I need to note that the results above aren’t directly comparable to the numbers in the original post. The original analysis looked at 6,692 names, while this one took 7,358 names into account. Why the difference? Well, 666 names (ominously enough!) were on both the male and female lists, so they counted twice this time around.

In a few days I’ll post about first letters in terms of percentages instead of raw numbers, so you’ll be able to see how things stack up in relative terms…