What letters most commonly start first names?

Tim Swast
1 min readFeb 13, 2017

A quick query reveals that the letter J most commonly starts first names in the U.S.

The letter J most commonly starts first names in the U.S.

Letter U is the least common. It barely shows up on the chart, so if you are looking for a unique name, maybe pick one that starts with U. Note that Unique isn’t entirely unique, though. About 100 children have been named Unique every year since the 1970s. Verify it for yourself with this query.

I generated the bar chart by exporting the query results to Google Sheets.

You can run the BigQuery queries in this data doodle for free, no credit card required, with 1TB of free queries per month.

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Tim Swast

I code and draw pixel art. Developer Relations @googlecloud Views expressed here are my own. Homepage: https://www.timswast.com/