Baby Names Observatory

Additional information

Notes

The data contained in this interactive dashboard come from the Canadian Vital Statistics - Birth database (CVSB) by Statistics Canada and the List of Baby Names (available in French only) by Retraite Québec. For Quebec, the database includes all children who were eligible for family benefits, including newborn babies living in Quebec.

During the production of each year's birth and stillbirth statistics, data from previous years may be revised to reflect any updates or changes that have been made.

Due to improvements in methodology and timeliness, the duration of data collection has been shortened compared to previous years. As a result, there may have been fewer births and stillbirths captured by the time of the release. Births from the most recent year are considered preliminary and previous data may have been revised.

The first name is the name which appears first in the full given name taken from the data sources. Missing first names, those composed of a single letter and those with a frequency less than 5 are excluded. In the source data, names are presented in a format in which an accented letter is replaced with the unaccented version of the letter. For instance, a name registered as “François” will appear as “Francois.” First names which include a hyphen are kept in full.

Definitions

Frequency

Number of times a first name was recorded for a baby during the year.

Proportion

The total frequency of a first name divided by the total number of all first names for a given year, by sex at birth, expressed in percentage.

Rank

Place in a set whose elements are classified according to a determined order. A descending rank means that the frequency of names is ordered from highest to lowest. When two or more different names are tied with the same frequency for a given year of birth, the equality is preserved and the following name will jump as many ranks as equality between the previous names (ex.: 92, 92, 92, 95).

Sex at birth

Identifies the sex of the child. Values can be “male”, “female”, or “unknown” in the Birth Database. Missing data on sex were imputed based on the distribution of births in recent years. Prior to 2012, “unknown” was changed to “male” if the registration number was odd, and “female” otherwise. For this interactive web application, the term “male” had been replaced with the term “boy”, and “female” with “girl”.

Birth registration forms collect the sex at birth of a child. However, the gender of the child may be recorded on the certificate of birth in certain provinces and territories in some years.

To learn more

The Families, households and marital status statistics portal is available for more information on the family subject.