The Endangered Names List is a reading room for the yearly register of American first names published by the U.S. Social Security Administration (1880–2025). It tracks names to the federal reporting line — five births per sex per year — below which the record prints nothing. The List catalogs the vanished, the long missing, the critically low, the returned, and the sturdy ghosts, and declines, on principle and on evidence, to call anything extinct.
All counts derive from the SSA national names file (names.zip), a public dataset. The dataset's limits are documented plainly on the Methods page; the site's claims are bounded by them. Curation and commentary are ours.
The List is one of the sibling archives of The Museum of Hopeful Machines.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration national names file (1880–2025). Names below 5 occurrences in a year are not reported.
Somewhere, a grandmother is unsurprised.
A collection of THE MUSEUM OF HOPEFUL MACHINES