How popular is the baby name Jason in the United States right now? How popular was it historically? Use the popularity graph and data table below to find out! Plus, see all the blog posts that mention the name Jason.

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Popularity of the baby name Jason


Posts that mention the name Jason

For-profit baby names

California mom-to-be Natasha Hill — the woman who was supposed to be getting $5,000 for allowing strangers to name her unborn baby via the site Belly Ballot — isn’t really pregnant. She isn’t even really named “Natasha Hill.”

Her name is Natasha Lloyd, and she’s an actress who was hired by the website’s founder to help drum up publicity.

Yep — the whole thing was a hoax. The folks at Today.com were the ones to figure it out:

When TODAY Moms first reported on the contest, some readers were incredulous; they couldn’t believe a real mom would do such a thing. Now it appears they were right.

Except…they weren’t. Several “real moms” (and dads) have indeed done such a thing. Here are all the for-profit baby names (and attempts) I know of:

*I never blogged about these three, so here are the details:

  • In 2001, Jason Black and Frances Schroeder of New York tried to auction off the name of their third child (first son) via Yahoo and eBay. They were aiming for a corporate sponsor, so the bidding started at $500,000. No one bid. They ended up naming the baby Zane Black.
  • In 2002, Bob and Tracy Armstrong from Florida tried to auction off the name of their baby (gender unknown) via eBay. After eBay pulled the auction for the third time, they decided not to try again.
  • In 2002, Heather and Steve Johnston of Washington state tried to auction off the name of their baby boy via eBay. The bidding started at $250,000. I found no follow-up stories, so I imagine the auction was either pulled or unsuccessful.

Video games on one end, $15,000 on the other…such wildly different values placed on baby names. Kinda fascinating, isn’t it?

Sources: $5,000 online baby-name contest revealed as hoax, Mom crowdsources baby name for $5,000

Image: Adapted from $20 Federal Reserve Bank Note (1929) (public domain)

[Latest update: Dec. 2024]

Baby born amid flooding, named Noah

The first floor of Serena Chaput’s house in Guerneville, California, was filling up with floodwater when she awoke with labor pains at 2 am on January 1, 1997 — right in the middle of Northern California’s New Year’s Flood of 1997.

She and her husband Jason endured “a tortuous journey involving several boats, two ambulances, and a semi-high speed chase” to get to the hospital.

They made it, and their baby boy was born at 5:40 am. He was named Noah.

(And here are two more flood-babies named Noah, one born in 1934, the other in 2007.)

Sources:

  • Kleinberg, Jody. “Newborn of Floods Aptly Named Noah.” Press Democrat 2 Jan. 1997.
  • Kleinberg, Jody. “Baby’s Birth Still Memorable Part of New Year’s Flood.” Press Democrat 2 Jan. 1998.

Dad writes algorithm to choose baby name, result is only so-so

Over the weekend, I read Renee Moilanen’s funny account of her husband attempting “a more mathematical approach to baby naming” after all other methods had failed.

First, he had us each write down names that appealed to us. Second, my husband categorized our choices using three different baby name books to determine that we wanted a timeless name in the “fitting in/standing out” genre. Next, he downloaded 200 years’ worth of historical baby name data from the Social Security Administration and loaded it into a geeky software program called Matlab.

Lastly – I swear I am not making this up – he created an algorithm to yield all of the timeless, fitting in/standing out and not-too-trendy names by weeding out names with big popularity spikes (goodbye Jennifer and Jason) and those currently in the top 100 of popularity.

(Have to be nitpicky for just a second — the SSA only has about 130 years’ worth of data, not 200 years’ worth.)

Sadly, after all that work, they didn’t find a name they loved.

[W]e picked a name off the list that we both could tolerate. We didn’t love it, and even now, we only half-joke about changing it. But the name seems like it suits our serious little engineer-in-training: Grant.

Undoubtedly, when Grant grows up, he’ll hate his name. But at the very least, he’ll have to appreciate his father’s dogged determination to find a quantifiably perfect name. My husband spent many long nights tweaking that algorithm and crunching data for a little guy he’d never met but loved just the same.

On the one hand, it’s a great story. I love that the husband actually set out to find a “quantifiably perfect name.”

On the other hand, the name they ended up with is one they “tolerate” and “half-joke about.” Hm.

What do you think — successful experiment?

Source: Moilanen, Renee. “Who picks a name for a newborn without crunching the data first?” Daily Breeze 19 Feb. 2010.

English family with 13 children

kinderfest

Sara Foss and Stephen Smith of Derby, England, have 13 children (and are expecting their 14th in April). The names of the 13 they currently have are…

  1. Patrick, 21 years old
    • his name comes from Sara’s grandmother’s surname
  2. Stephen, 13
    • named after his father
  3. Malachai, 12
    • named after a character in the horror movie Children Of The Corn
  4. Peppermint, 11
    • name inspired by Sara’s pregnancy cravings
  5. Echo, 10
    • named after “a group of eco-campaigners who Stephen met during a job at work”
  6. Eli, 9
    • named after another character in Children Of The Corn
  7. Rogue, 8
    • named after a character in the movie X-Men
  8. Frodo, 6
    • named after a hobbit in The Lord of the Rings
  9. Morpheus, 5
    • named after a character in the movie The Matrix
  10. Artemis, 4
    • named after children’s book character Artemis Fowl
  11. Blackbird, 3
    • named after “a gathering of blackbirds which flew onto Sara’s lawn”
  12. Baudelaire, 23 months
    • named after the Baudelaire orphans in the movie Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events
  13. Voorhees, 10 months

Voorhees — because he was the 13th baby — was named after Jason Voorhees, the serial killer in the horror movie Friday the 13th. His middle name? Halloween.

Sources:

Image: Ein Kinderfest (1868) by Ludwig Knaus

[Latest update: May 2024]