People love talking about baby names, and so the time of year when Retraite Québec announces the most popular names of the year is always a tempting fruit for a journalist looking for a quick story.

Unfortunately, the top five names doesn’t tell us that much. Liam and Olivia have been popular for a while now, and the top five doesn’t change that much year to year. Some journalists go a bit further and look at the end of the list for more unusual names (misspellings, mashed-up names, or words you wouldn’t think of as names), which can be amusing if you can avoid making fun of a name in a language you don’t understand.

Fortunately, Quebec’s open data website has full datasets of first names used since 1980 for boys and girls, so how about we do some more interesting number crunching?

Rather than just look at the most and least popular, I decided to see if I can suss out some trends. So I took the full data set, with almost 400,000 first names, and added a column calculating how many times they were used in the past 10 years versus the past 40 years. Normally this would be about 25%, but many names have gotten much more or much less popular.

A few caveats about these lists:

• The database only goes back to 1980, so names that had already fallen out of favour by then won’t show up.
• I’m assuming the database is correct. There may be errors here throwing off the results.
• The lists are separated by gender because it’s two different data sets. In several cases names have gotten less popular because they’re traditionally associated with the other gender. Combining them would take a while and probably crash my computer.
• For data entry cleanup reasons, I’ve excluded compound names from these lists (whether they have a hyphen or a space separating them) as well as names that are in the database as just one letter (which I assume are initials incorrectly coded as names). I’ve also set minimums for the number of times a name has to be used to weed out outliers.
• Since the database does not include accents, I have not included them here.

Good? OK, here we go:

Most trending girls’ names of the decade

Percentage of name use in the past 10 years vs. past 40 (minimum 50 uses overall)

1. Adaline (100%)
2. Cataleya (100%) — also Kataleya (100%)
3. Everly (99%)
4. Lexie (95%) — also Lexy (93%)
5. Joury (95%)
6. Arya (94%) — also Aria (93%)
7. Nelya (94%)
8. Evalie (93%)
9. Olie (92%)
10. Blake (91%)
11. Romie (90%)
12. Octavia (90%)
13. Elyrose (89%)
14. Inaya (89%)
15. Harper (89%)
16. Esmee (89%)
17. Lexa (88%)
18. Maddie (87%) — also Maddy (80%)
19. Noralie (87%)
20. Alyss (87%) — also Alyce (80%)

Other notables:

• Zoey (85%)
• Mila (85%)
• Romy (85%)
• Quinn (84%)
• Liv (84%)
• Scarlett (84%)
• Isla (83%)
• Zoely (83%) and Zoelie (81%)
• Livia (82%) and Lyvia (80%)
• Aby (81%)
• Ophelia (81%)

Most trending boys’ names of the decade

Percentage of name use in the past 10 years vs. past 40 (minimum 50 uses overall)

1. Zayn (98%)
2. Elyam (97%) — also Aylan (92%)
3. Mayson (97%) — also Maysen (94%)
4. Jaxson (96%) — also Jaxon (93%), Jackson (87%)
5. Jax (96%)
6. Dastan (95%)
7. Arlo (94%)
8. Jayce (93%) — also Jace (83%)
9. Manoe (92%)
10. Mayden (92%)
11. Meshilem (92%)
12. Greyson (92%)
13. Jayke (91%)
14. Nate (90%)
15. Mylan (90%) — also Milann (87%), Milan (85%)
16. Charlot (90%)
17. Bentley (90%)
18. London (89%)
19. Selyan (88%)
20. Lyam (88%) — also Liam (76%)

Other notables:

• Auguste (87%)
• Kayden (86%)
• Nolan (84%) — also Nohlan (83%)
• Logan (83%)
• Ayden (82%) — also Eyden (82%)
• Lincoln (82%)
• Jayden (80%)
• Hayden (80%)

Disappeared girls’ names

Names unused in the past 10 years (but used at least 100 times from 1980 to 2010). Excludes compound names and single-character names.

1. Marylene (401) and Marilene (164)
2. Casandra (217)
3. Kristin (151)
4. Cyntia (121)
5. Daniele (103)

Disappeared boys’ names

Names unused in the past 10 years (but used at least 100 times from 1980 to 2010). Excludes compound names and single-character names.

1. Ghislain (413) and Ghyslain (174)
2. Rachel (380)
3. Chloe (224)
4. Rejean (187)
5. Kimberly (148)
6. Lindsay (133)
7. Erin (112)

Least trending girls’ names of the decade

Other names used little in the past 10 years vs. past 40 (excludes compound names and single-character names, minimum 100 uses overall).

1. Karine and Karyne
2. Annik, Anik, Annick and Anick
3. Josee
4. Natacha
5. Veronique and Veronic
6. Maryline, Marilyne and Marilyn
7. Carolyne and Caroline
8. Sindy
9. Chantale
10. Genevieve
11. Mylaine
12. Jinny
13. Chantal
14. Melanie
15. Martine
16. Stephanie and Stefanie
17. Cinthia and Cynthia
18. Johannie
19. Guylaine
20. Jannie

Other notables:

• Kathy, Cathie and Cathy (1%)
• Nancy (1%)
• France (1%)
• Cindy (1%)
• Sylvie (1%)
• Joannie and Joanie (1%)
• Pascale (1%)
• Patricia (1%)
• Vanessa (1%)
• Jessica (1%)
• Dominique (2%)
• Claudia (2%)
• Nathalie (2%)
• Christine (2%)
• Annie (2%)
• Sandra (2%)
• Melissa (2%)
• Jennifer (2%)
• Catherine (2%)
• Isabelle (3%)
• Sabrina (3%)
• Audrey (3%)
• Nadia (4%)
• Karen (4%)
• Alexandra (5%)

Least trending boys’ names

Other names used little in the past 10 years vs. past 40 (excludes compound names and single-character names, minimum 100 uses overall).

1. Sylvain
2. Jocelyn
3. Frederique
4. Regis
5. Kim
6. Ashley
7. Steeve, Steve and Stephane
8. Kaven, Keaven and Keven
9. Dominique
10. Patrice
11. Guy
12. Pascal
13. Yanic, Yanick and Yannick
14. Jessie
15. Stacy
16. Carol
17. Kimberley
18. Boby
19. Francis
20. Reginald

Other notables:

• Marion (1%)
• Dave (1%)
• Alain (2%)
• Danny (2%)
• Francois (2%)
• Carl (2%)
• Yves (2%)
• Sebastien (2%)
• Eric (2%)
• Patrick (2%)
• Martin (2%)
• Luc (2%)
• Jonathan (2%)
• Michel (3%)
• Mathieu (3%) and Matthieu (4%)
• Bruno (3%)
• Kevin (3%)
• Guillaume (3%)
• Steven (3%)
• Frederic (4%) and Frederick (5%)
• Marc (4%)
• Benoit (4%)
• Richard (4%)
• Yan (4%) and Yann (5%)
• Pierre (4%)
• Dominic (4%)
• Maxime (5%)
• Jimmy (5%)
• Andre (5%)