British Columbia's most popular boys' name of 2023, Noah, was given to 205 babies; in 1950 the top name, Robert, went to 836. On the girls' side, 2023's Olivia was given to 196 babies against Linda's 545 in 1950 — from the province's own hundred-year registry of names chosen five or more times.
OFFICIAL BC Vital Statistics Agency — Most popular boys' names for the past hundred years (CSV) · OFFICIAL BC Vital Statistics Agency — Most popular girls' names for the past hundred years (CSV)
Possible explanations
One reading: individualism — parents now optimize for distinctiveness, and the whole distribution of names has flattened.
Another: a wider pool — immigration has broadened the set of names in use, so no single name dominates the way mid-century favourites did.
Named confounder: Annual birth counts also changed across the century, and the registry publishes raw counts rather than shares of births — so the fall of the top name overstates or understates the diversification depending on each year's cohort size.
What would settle it
A published share-of-births series for top names, or Statistics Canada's Baby Names Observatory rankings read across provinces and decades.
Sources — the Signals register (2)
Signals may cite sources below Countability's official-data floor — the only place on the site that does. Each such source is labelled with its own standing warning wherever it appears.
OFFICIALBC Vital Statistics Agency
Most popular boys' names for the past hundred years (CSV)
BC open data; names chosen five or more times only (small-cell suppression applied by the publisher).
Open source → · accessed 2026-07-09 · archived at citation
OFFICIALBC Vital Statistics Agency
Most popular girls' names for the past hundred years (CSV)
BC open data; names chosen five or more times only (small-cell suppression applied by the publisher).
Open source → · accessed 2026-07-09 · archived at citation
Signals sit outside the core Record. No published claim or finding rests on a Signal, and a Signal enters the Record only by passing the same evidence and review standards as every other claim.