After spending way too many hours scrolling baby-name lists when my wife and I were name-hunting, I built Peek a Name — a free, no-signup baby name database with 145 years of US Social Security Administration data (1880–2024).
What you get
- 117,146 unique names with full popularity history
- 372 million birth records — every baby named in the US since 1880
- Data for all 50 states + territories (54 regions total)
- 100% free, no signup, no paywall
Some pages that might be fun to explore
- Most popular names of 2024
- Top 1990s names vs. top 2020s names
- Trending / rising / falling names
- Search any name, e.g. Olivia, Liam, Theodore
Free tools
- Random name generator
- Sibling name finder
- Age guesser — guess someone's age from their name
- Name compatibility
- Name bracket — tournament-style decision tool
- Era matcher — find names from a specific decade
Stack
-
Astro 5 with
@astrojs/nodemiddleware mode for SSR - Hono API in the same Node process
- Drizzle ORM + better-sqlite3 — the entire dataset is a 810 MB local SQLite file (WAL mode), no external database
- Tailwind CSS 4
- Single Docker container (300 MB memory limit) on a $6 VPS, fronted by Cloudflare
8.7M-row SQLite queries return in <10 ms — way faster than I expected. Drizzle's type-safety + SQLite's locality made this trivial to build solo in a few weekends.
A small public dataset companion repo is at github.com/yusufcetin82/peekaname-public — top-100 names of 2024 as JSON, more samples coming.
Would love any feedback, especially on the trend predictor (it's a simple time-series fit, ideas for better algorithms welcome).
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