the united states social security administration (ssahas made available data on the frequency of baby names from through the present hadley wickhaman author of several popular packageshas often made use of this data set in illustrating data manipulation in in [ ]names head( out[ ]name sex births mary anna emma elizabeth minnie margaret ida alice bertha sarah year there are many things you might want to do with the data setvisualize the proportion of babies given particular name (your ownor another nameover time determine the relative rank of name determine the most popular names in each year or the names with largest increases or decreases analyze trends in namesvowelsconsonantslengthoverall diversitychanges in spellingfirst and last letters analyze external sources of trendsbiblical namescelebritiesdemographic changes using the tools we've looked at so farmost of these kinds of analyses are very straightforwardso will walk you through many of them encourage you to download and explore the data yourself if you find an interesting pattern in the datai would love to hear about it as of this writingthe us social security administration makes available data filesone per yearcontaining the total number of births for each sex/name combination the raw archive of these files can be obtained herein the event that this page has been moved by the time you're reading thisit can most likely be located again by internet search after downloading the "national datafile names zip and unzipping ityou will have directory containing series of files like yob txt use the unix head command to look at the first lines of one of the files (on windowsyou can use the more command or open it in text editor) introductory examples www it-ebooks info