Humanverse

Baby names of 1966

Lisa and Michael topped the lists in 1966, out of 3,475,638 births recorded across 11,036 different names. That is 4.1% fewer than the 1965 files hold. About 3 million of them are alive today.

← 1965 All years 1967 →

Girls

#NameBirths
1Lisa56,918
2Kimberly32,232
3Mary28,890
4Michelle27,159
5Karen25,450
6Susan23,776
7Patricia20,112
8Tammy18,621
9Angela18,532
10Jennifer18,215
11Cynthia17,418
12Donna17,037
13Julie16,331
14Deborah16,250
15Pamela16,249
16Elizabeth15,887
17Sandra15,851
18Linda15,566
19Laura15,553
20Christine15,546
21Lori14,671
22Melissa14,254
23Tina13,892
24Dawn13,603
25Brenda13,294

All 200 girls’ names of 1966 (7,624 recorded)

Boys

#NameBirths
1Michael79,985
2David66,408
3James65,163
4John65,016
5Robert59,317
6William38,237
7Mark34,801
8Richard34,457
9Jeffrey30,200
10Thomas29,003
11Timothy28,923
12Christopher27,866
13Steven27,698
14Brian27,253
15Joseph26,981
16Scott26,036
17Kevin25,592
18Paul23,578
19Daniel23,269
20Charles22,252
21Kenneth20,834
22Anthony20,624
23Gregory17,009
24Ronald16,952
25Eric16,475

All 200 boys’ names of 1966 (4,540 recorded)

Biggest climbers, girls

Names that gained the most ground on 1965:

Joell and Christian are here because the girls’ file records them: the SSA publishes every name given to five or more babies of one sex, and a rank is a position within that list. It is not a claim about whose name it is.

Biggest climbers, boys

Names that gained the most ground on 1965:

Tammy is here because the boys’ file records it: the SSA publishes every name given to five or more babies of one sex, and a rank is a position within that list. It is not a claim about whose name it is.

First recorded in 1966, girls

Names the SSA had never published before 1966:

First recorded in 1966, boys

Names the SSA had never published before 1966:

Try it on yourself

Source: US Social Security Administration national baby-name files. Names given to fewer than five babies in a year are not published, so the totals here run below the true number of births. How far below is not the same in every year: the files hold 201,484 births for 1880 and 3,315,343 for 2025, so a change from one year to the next in the early decades is partly a change in what the record covers.