This repository provides a unified dataset of baby names registered in England and Wales, combining all available datasets published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). It includes:
- Boys’ names
- Girls’ names
- Historic top 100 names
- Breakdowns by England, Wales, and England and Wales jointly
The ONS publishes separate datasets for boys and girls, as well as a historical summary of the top 100 names going back decades. These datasets are spread across multiple Excel files and formats, with slight structural differences over time.
This repo fetches, cleans, and consolidates these into a tidy, long-format dataset for analysis and reuse.
| Dataset | Description | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Boys' names | Annual baby name stats for boys in England and Wales | ONS boys |
| Girls' names | Annual baby name stats for girls in England and Wales | ONS girls |
| Historic | Top 100 baby names from 1904 onwards at 10-year intervals | ONS historic |
download.Rfetches the latest datasets from ONS into thedata-rawdirectorymain.Rprocesses these files, harmonising formats and combining them into a single dataset which is output toons-baby-names-clean.csv
You can query the dataset using the DuckDB shell — click the link to explore with SQL in the browser.
The dataset includes rankings for each decade from 1904 to 1994 for England and Wales, followed by annual data from 1996 onwards for England, Wales, and England and Wales jointly. Each row represents a baby name at a specific time and geography, along with its rank and number of registrations (count).
| year | sex | geography | geography_label | rank | name | count |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1996 | Female | K04000001 | England and Wales | 1 | Sophie | 7087 |
| 1996 | Female | K04000001 | England and Wales | 2 | Chloe | 6824 |
| 1996 | Female | K04000001 | England and Wales | 3 | Jessica | 6711 |
| 1996 | Female | K04000001 | England and Wales | 4 | Emily | 6415 |
| 1996 | Female | K04000001 | England and Wales | 5 | Lauren | 6299 |
| 1996 | Female | K04000001 | England and Wales | 6 | Hannah | 5916 |
This project is open source under the MIT licence. Data is Crown copyright and reproduced under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0.