According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 3,932,181 babies were born in 2013 (the most recent year with data available). And just over half of those births were male, according to the CIA World Fact Book.
Roughly 4 million new babies means roughly the same number of new unique identities and personalities. But there is one thing many of the newborns share besides the basic structure of human DNA: their name.
That's right, in the United States alone, for example, there are currently well over 5 million people with the first name of John. There are also well over 4 million Americans named Mary. Though we often think of our names as unique, it can be awe-inspiring to remember millions of Americans are connected simply because they share a first name.
As a fun experiment, the folks over at FiveThirtyEight decided to crunch some numbers on a very specific kind of name. They wanted to know what currently is the most common unisex name in America. For a historical perspective, there's also this Buzzfeed piece from a few years ago, and you might be surprised by what they found.
"It turns out that nearly 1 percent of Americans (or 1 in 109) have a unisex name," FiveThirtyEight's Andrew Flowers wrote Wednesday, "which means that at least one-third of newborns given that name were male and at least one-third were female."
So which names came out on top? Here we've listed the 25 most popular unisex names according to FiveThirtyEight's analysis of data from the Social Security Administration.
To read more about how they figured it all out, be sure to check out FiveThirtyEight’s original article.
JJ Feinauer is a writer for Deseret News National. Email: jfeinauer@deseretdigital.com, Twitter: jjfeinauer.