Exciting news for all name nerds, especially those from South Australia! The Attorney-General’s Department for South Australia has made available all names given between the years 1944 and 2013. Yep that’s right – no messing around with five or more births, this is every single name given to every single baby for almost seventy years.

For example, last year some of the unique names given to boys in South Australia were Igor, Leek, Nazareth, and Woodrow, while girls with one-off names were Chloris, Era, March, and Swanika.

If you’ve ever downloaded the complete name data from the US Social Security website, it’s very similar to that. You download the main folder as a rar file, then access a separate Excel file for each year, which has all names listed from most uses to least. The main difference is that there is a separate file for boys’ and girls’ names.

To find this gold mine of name data, go to

http://www.data.sa.gov.au/dataset/popular-baby-names

and download the yellow csv file, labelled Most Popular Baby Names (1944-2013), which is the first link.

Happy name searching! And in case you’re wondering, of course this information is going to be used on the blog in various ways. A permanent link will be made available on the Links to Name Data page as well.