Classic, trendy, or unique? How do parents name their babies? Are those surnames popular these days that were in the 2000s? Here come some trends about surnames given to newborns in Hungary. (For a better user experience, please view the post on desktop).

Before we could plunge into the sea of Hungarian surnames, the statistical data of the top 100 Hungarian baby names between 2000 and 2018 were downloaded, then the data was cleaned and processed. The figure below shows how many newborn girls were named by a given name in the last almost 20 years.

Let’s see the trends of boy names.

The success story of Zoé

The rising star of the 2010s is Zoé, which was not yet in the top 100 in 2000, and jumped to the 2nd place in 2018. Another trendy girl name of the 2010s is Léna, the popularity of which was rising year by year. It seems that Anna is an all time classic, which is constantly in the top 3, similarly to Zsófia, which stays in the top 15. Who knows why, but such a classic name as Viktória is gradually losing its popularity. We illustrated the position of these girl names between 2000 and 2018 with a Cartesian grid.

The golden age of Bence

The hottest names given to boys in Hungary since 2000 are Bence and Máté. The most trendy ones nowadays are Noel and Nimród, which were almost nowhere in 2000. There are classics, like Péter, which don’t go out of fashion – at least they are in the top 15 for decades. How the position of these boy names changed is illustrated below.

About the figures

While studying the order of the names, we were wondering how to illustrate certain trends. As the list of the authorized Hungarian surnames is constantly growing, while the number of birth is gradually falling, one cannot draw far-reaching conclusion from the frequency of names. Consequently, we were examining the annual list of the top 100 names from 2000 to 2018. We applied a logarithmic scale on the X-axis. Thus, the first four squares of the figure present the first four names of the annual lists, but after them, it is shown which tenth of the scale the name belongs to. This method enables us to illustrate the great jumps and it forbids the x-axis to spread out. The figures were created in Inkscape, with the inbuilt Cartesian grid tool. Our figures are considered experiments. We intend to fine-tune the illustration of ranked data, as we are working with such data in several projects.

Data source

https://www.nyilvantarto.hu/hu/statisztikak

Codes and tools

The cover image was generated by the code that can be found in this repo.

The source code of the interactive visualizations is in this repo.

The images were made in Inkscape.