Baby Boom

What is Baby Boom?

Baby Boom is a free daily baby-name game built from more than a century of U.S. Social Security Administration data. Every day the site shows you five baby names, one at a time, and asks the same simple question for each: in what year was this name at its most popular? Type a year or drag the slider, lock it in, and see how close you landed against the name’s real peak year. Each name is worth up to 100 points, for a best possible score of 500.

What “peak” means

A name’s peak year is the year it reached the highest share of that sex’s births, not the year the most babies actually got it. The two are not the same, because U.S. births themselves boomed from 1946 to 1964 — the actual baby boom this game borrows its name from. If Baby Boom ranked names by raw counts instead of share, almost every name would look like it peaked somewhere in that eighteen-year stretch, simply because so many more babies were born overall. Measuring each name’s slice of its own year’s births, girls against girls and boys against boys, shows when a name was genuinely most fashionable rather than when the country happened to be having the most children.

Scoring

Scoring rewards a close year, not an exact one. A guess within 2 years of the real peak, in either direction, earns the full 100 points. Points fall steadily as the gap widens and reach zero once you are 25 years off. Guessing too early costs exactly as much as guessing too late, so there is never a reason to hedge toward one direction — just aim for your best estimate of the year itself.

Hints and streaks

Stuck on a name? Each one offers one optional hint: a 20-year window that always contains the real peak, but is never centered on it, so the window alone will not hand you the answer. Taking a free hint adds a small light bulb to your shared result; watching a short optional ad reveals the same window without it, so friends can tell a clean solve from an assisted one. After you lock in a guess, every reveal draws the name’s full popularity curve since 1880, with its true peak and your guess both marked, so you can see at a glance how fashions for that name have risen and fallen. Finishing the daily puzzle on consecutive days builds your streak, and everything — your streak, your history and your hint use — lives in your browser rather than an account, so there is nothing to sign up for and nothing to lose except by clearing your own site data.