How do you spell “Brittany”? The picture above has four well-known women with four different spellings of the name. It turns out there are nearly 100 different ways that Americans have spelled it. The US Social Security Administration names data lets us tease out all the spellings and find out which ones are most popular – and when.
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One of the amazing things about being a DBA/developer in 2016 is the sheer amount of freely available, downloadable data to play with. One fun publicly available data sets is the American Social Security Administration names data. It contains all names for which SSNs were issued for each year, with the number of occurrences (although names with <5 occurrences are not included to protect individual privacy).