Full baby name data (1964–2023) for Ireland, gathered from the Central Statistics Office.
The package contains the dataset iebabynames
with 78,897 observations
on six variables: year
, sex
, name
, n
, rank
, and prop
, and
prop_sex
. Due to confidentiality reasons, only names with 3 or more
instances in the relevant year are included.
The package can be used to explore patterns of baby names in Ireland
over time. The dataset iebabynames
is also very suitable for
filtering, summarising and plotting variables in workshops or lectures.
The structure of the package follows the babynames package by Hadley Wickham and the ukbabynames package by Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, Thomas Leeper, and Nicholas Goguen-Compagnoni.
The package is hosted on GitHub and not available at CRAN. To install the latest development version:
if (!require("remotes")) {
install.packages("remotes")
}
remotes::install_github("stefan-mueller/iebabynames")
# load packages
library(iebabynames)
library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)
library(scales)
# set ggplot2 theme
theme_set(theme_bw())
head(iebabynames)
## year sex name n rank prop prop_sex
## 1 2023 Female Grace 339 1 0.007325137 0.01533728
## 2 2023 Female Fiadh 300 2 0.006482422 0.01357282
## 3 2023 Female Emily 297 3 0.006417598 0.01343709
## 4 2023 Female Sophie 283 4 0.006115085 0.01280369
## 5 2023 Female Lily 270 5 0.005834180 0.01221554
## 6 2023 Female Ellie 252 6 0.005445234 0.01140117
dat_top_2023 <- iebabynames %>%
filter(year == "2023") %>%
group_by(sex) %>%
top_n(n = 10, wt = -rank) # get top 10
dat_top_2023
## # A tibble: 20 × 7
## # Groups: sex [2]
## year sex name n rank prop prop_sex
## <dbl> <chr> <chr> <int> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
## 1 2023 Female Grace 339 1 0.00733 0.0153
## 2 2023 Female Fiadh 300 2 0.00648 0.0136
## 3 2023 Female Emily 297 3 0.00642 0.0134
## 4 2023 Female Sophie 283 4 0.00612 0.0128
## 5 2023 Female Lily 270 5 0.00583 0.0122
## 6 2023 Female Ellie 252 6 0.00545 0.0114
## 7 2023 Female Mia 242 7 0.00523 0.0109
## 8 2023 Female Amelia 241 8 0.00521 0.0109
## 9 2023 Female Éabha 241 8 0.00521 0.0109
## 10 2023 Female Ella 231 10 0.00499 0.0105
## 11 2023 Male Jack 561 1 0.0121 0.0232
## 12 2023 Male Noah 473 2 0.0102 0.0196
## 13 2023 Male James 369 3 0.00797 0.0153
## 14 2023 Male Rían 339 4 0.00733 0.0140
## 15 2023 Male Oisín 330 5 0.00713 0.0136
## 16 2023 Male Fionn 306 6 0.00661 0.0127
## 17 2023 Male Tadhg 301 7 0.00650 0.0125
## 18 2023 Male Liam 289 8 0.00624 0.0120
## 19 2023 Male Cillian 275 9 0.00594 0.0114
## 20 2023 Male Daniel 256 10 0.00553 0.0106
iebabynames_top <- iebabynames %>%
group_by(sex, name) %>%
summarise(n_total = sum(n)) %>%
top_n(n = 10, wt = n_total)
ggplot(iebabynames_top, aes(x = n_total,
y = reorder(name, n_total),
fill = sex)) +
geom_bar(stat = "identity") +
geom_text(aes(label = name), nudge_x = -2000,
hjust = "right",
colour = "white") +
scale_x_continuous(labels = scales::comma_format()) +
scale_fill_manual(values = c("#83D0F5", "#71B294")) +
labs(title = "Frequency of Baby Names in Ireland (1964–2023)",
x = "Number of Babies",
y = NULL) +
theme(axis.text.y = element_blank(),
axis.ticks.y = element_blank(),
legend.title = element_blank(),
legend.position = "bottom")
ggplot(data = filter(iebabynames, name %in% c("John", "Mary")),
aes(x = year, y = prop)) +
geom_smooth(se = FALSE) +
scale_x_continuous(breaks = c(seq(1963, 2023, 10))) +
scale_y_continuous(labels = scales::percent,
breaks = c(seq(0, 0.06, 0.01))) +
geom_point(alpha = 0.4) +
facet_wrap(~name) +
labs(x = NULL, y = "Percentage of Babies")
iebabynames_variants <- iebabynames %>%
filter(name %in% c("Aoife", "Aoibhe", "Eva",
"Eve"))
ggplot(data = iebabynames_variants,
aes(x = year, y = n)) +
geom_smooth(se = FALSE) +
scale_x_continuous(breaks = c(seq(1963, 2023, 20))) +
geom_point(alpha = 0.4) +
facet_wrap(~name, nrow = 1) +
labs(x = NULL, y = "Frequency") +
theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, vjust = 0.5))
The website of the Central Statistics Office includes an interactive interface that allows you to plot the frequency and rank of custom names.
Stefan Müller (2024). iebabynames: Ireland Baby Names, 1964–2023. R package version 0.2.4. URL: http://github.com/stefan-mueller/iebabynames.
If you use the data, please also cite the CSO website: https://www.cso.ie/en/interactivezone/visualisationtools/babynamesofireland/.
Please file an issue (with a bug, wish list, etc.) via GitHub.