I've been doing a little research on names. You know, people names like Peter and Mary. In the course of this, I came across the Social Security Administration site on "Popular Baby Names." This lists the popularity and ranking of baby names in the US for every year since 1879. You can parse the info in many different ways. You can put in a name and see its rank of popularity for every year. This assumes that the name makes it into the top 1000 names. More obscure names won't show up.

The historical data is interesting but one thing I immediately noticed was a pattern in the female names in the top 20. The pattern held for names in 2004 and for names in 1900.

Female names were dominated by names that began with vowels or "M". There were eleven of the top twenty girl names in each of the years that met this criteria. I couldn't discern any comparable pattern in the boy names.

Nothing earth-shattering here, just... interesting.