UK baby names mapped: which British counties do Americans actually use as first names?

The project: mapping British counties against 145 years of American naming records

A British national living in the United States has created a data visualisation that cross-references every historic English county name against the full archive of the US Social Security Administration’s baby name database, which runs from 1880 to the present day.

The question driving the project was straightforward: Americans clearly do give their children names that happen to be British county names, but which ones, and how consistently? The result is a mapped breakdown showing where names such as Kent and Devon appear with regularity, and where others, Middlesex or Leicestershire for instance, are essentially absent from the record entirely.

The post was shared to the r/CasualUK community on Reddit in May 2026 and drew immediate engagement from British and American users alike.

What the SSA baby name database actually contains

The Social Security Administration has published baby name frequency data drawn from Social Security card applications since 1880. A name only appears in the public dataset if it was given to at least five children of the same sex in a given year, a threshold designed to protect privacy while still capturing naming trends at a population level.

The dataset covers well over a century of American demographic history and is widely used by researchers, journalists, and data enthusiasts to track how naming fashions shift across generations. It is freely accessible via the SSA’s official baby names tool.

Kent and Devon: why some county names travel well as first names

Kent and Devon share characteristics that make them plausible given names in an American context. Both are short, phonetically clean, and carry no strong negative associations outside the UK. Kent in particular has been used as an American given name for decades, partly reinforced by cultural references including a certain fictional journalist from Smallville.

Devon (also spelled Devyn or Devin, though those are distinct names) has functioned as both a male and female given name in North America, and its soft ending has kept it in fashion across several decades of the SSA record.

The broader pattern visible in the data is that shorter county names with clean vowel sounds tend to be the ones that make the crossing. Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk are monosyllabic or disyllabic but carry slightly heavier consonant clusters. Longer or more complex county names, Northamptonshire, Worcestershire, Leicestershire, simply do not function as plausible first names in any naming tradition.

The Berk problem: when county names mean something else entirely

The post specifically calls out Berk as a county-name candidate that carries obvious hazards. Berkshire can be shortened to Berk, but in British English the word is a mild but recognisable insult, derived from Cockney rhyming slang. An American parent selecting it would have no reason to know that, but the detail illustrates how place names carry cultural freight that does not always travel with them.

This is a well-documented phenomenon in naming research. A name that is entirely neutral or even prestigious in one country can be awkward or comic in another, for reasons rooted in local slang, historical events, or phonetic accident.

Which counties are simply too long, or too specific, to cross the Atlantic

The absence of names such as Middlesex, Leicestershire, Northumberland, or Cambridgeshire from the American naming record is not surprising. These names are either too long to function as first names, too specifically associated with a place to feel like a personal name, or both.

Middlesex carries an additional complication in an American context, given that the second element of the compound word reads differently to a contemporary audience than it did when the county was named.

The data effectively draws a natural filter: county names that work as American first names tend to be those that could plausibly have been invented as given names independently, names where the geographical origin is not the only way to parse the word.

How this fits into the broader pattern of place names as given names

Using place names as given names is a long-established practice in English-speaking countries on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, names such as Chester, Lincoln, and Stanley have been common given names for well over a century, all originally place names. In the US, names such as Georgia, Montana, and Austin function similarly.

The movement of British county names into American naming culture is a smaller subset of this wider phenomenon, filtered by the specific constraints described above. The SSA data makes it possible to track this precisely rather than relying on anecdote.

What you can do with the SSA data yourself

The full SSA baby name dataset is publicly available and downloadable in text format from the Social Security Administration website. It covers individual years from 1880 onwards and can be filtered by name, year, and sex.

Anyone curious about a specific county name can search it directly using the SSA’s online tool without needing to download the full dataset. The tool returns a frequency chart showing usage over time, which makes it easy to see whether a name has been in consistent use or appeared only briefly.

Why this kind of data project resonates

Projects that map cultural overlap between the UK and the US tend to attract attention because the relationship between the two countries is simultaneously familiar and full of subtle differences. The framing here, a British person noticing something Americans do that British people would find odd, is a reliable source of gentle cross-cultural curiosity.

The detail about “poor baby Berk” anchors the broader data point in something human and specific, which is why the post gained traction on r/CasualUK rather than a more data-focused forum.

For more on the surprising ways British culture surfaces in unexpected contexts, see our coverage in the Curiosity hub.