1960 was the most popular year to name your baby ‘Dino’, with 386 Dinos born.

I love playing around with the free data that the Social Security Administration publishes on baby names each year.

It’s fun to manipulate the dataset in a variety of ways, and you learn odd things along the way… like the fact that more than 7,000 babies in the US have been named ‘Kale’ since 1917.

I’ve got more facts about Kale than you knew you wanted

The most popular year to be named Kale was 2008 (567 kales), which predates the time when the vegetable became super popular by at least a few years. More kale on your plate doesn’t mean you want to raise a ‘Kale’: there were only 175 Kales named in 2015.

Are those Kale Babies girls, or are they boys?

If you want to know, you’re going to have to download the BabbyNames database yourself– or grab the scripts and source data and build it.

It’s easy to download

It’s all free over on GitHub.

No login required, no nothin’.

“Why would I want this?”

Even if you don’t have a natural curiosity about babies named after vegetables, it can be fun to play around with different data sources to test queries and features. Not that I don’t love Microsoft’s WideWorldImporters, I just sometimes want something a little different.

“Why is it named BabbyNames?”

There are at least two lame jokes related to the name:

• You’ve heard of Little Bobby Tables? This is Little Babby Tables.
• An internet meme famously asked the question, “How is Babby Formed?” This database answers the question, “How is Babby Named?”

But I like the name because I find the word “Babby” to be funny, all by itself.

Enjoy!