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Comment by azurezyq | Hacker News Reader

I think this sentence is kind of BS:

> Having been the 32nd most popular name for girls born in 2015, Alexa's rank dropped to 139th in 2019, the lowest it's been since 1992.

Thanks for the link provided by adjkant below, here's the ranks per year:

2019 139

2018 90

2017 65

2016 51

2015 32

2014 63

2013 60

2012 57

2011 55

2010 50

2009 43

2008 50

2007 40

2006 39

2005 66

2004 72

2003 67

2002 69

2001 78

2000 87

I agree that ranks in 2018 and 2019 is low and on point. However 2015 is already an outlier. The sentence doesn't make much sense statistically. It's a bit like picking data points purposefully.

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Given that Alexa was launched publicly in 2014, perhaps it was responsible for the initial increase in popularity in 2015 by raising awareness of the name?

Having been on the inside of the project and directly involved in picking the name / wake word (which happened earlier than 2014), there were multiple considerations involved.

Particularly important was the functional requirement that the wake word chosen be able to support both high recognition rates and low false positives. We also did not want to have a "helper word" such as "hey" or "ok," as that would have required enforcing an unnatural speech pattern.

Baby name wizard has Alexa peaking in the 1990s when combined with various other related names. [1] The specific Alexa variant peaked in 2015 but that's in the context of the related names as a whole declining precipitously, albeit not to pre-80s levels.

I must admit that a reason for the popularity spike doesn't pop to mind but presumably there's some pop culture thing I'm not thinking of.

[1] https://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager#prefix=alexa&sw=both&...

well maybe there could've been an uptick but Amazon ruined it (or maybe even amazon was responsible for the uptick in 2015?). I know from Germany that short, phonetically nice sounding names are "in" and I'd guess it's similar in the US. Alexa does sound nice, actually. Probably why Amazon took it, even.

I assume there are also distinctiveness considerations. I'm guessing the "ex" phoneme is natural to pronounce but not super-common in English. And 3 syllables is probably a good compromise between distinctiveness and being too long.

A friend of mine was a big Billy Joel fan and named his child after his song "Downeaster Alexa". This probably accounts for the some of the spike in the 80's as well.

The babynamewizard scrapes the Social Security website (I believe - I don't know any other resource for this data)... which, unfortunately, doesn't have a linkable interface (everything is a POST request).

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/

Toss "Alexa" in the "Popularity of a Name" field and select 1900 & later.

Wolfram does a nice job of it too - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=alexa

Yes, the description and chart scream of typical journalist disinformation trying to make something seem bigger than it really is. Why does it start at 2015 when Alexa was released? We can't see if it's just continuing a trend. Also, popular baby names only last a few decades anyway, often ending their popularity with a rapid decline that looks just like this graph.

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