Baby names of 1988

Jessica and Michael topped the lists in 1988, out of 3,695,137 births recorded across 20,440 different names. That is 2.5% more than the 1987 files hold. About 3.6 million of them are alive today.

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.