The US Census Bureau has a nice web site that contains the most common
first names of both males and females from the 1990 census. You can
obtain the files from:
http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names/
the female names file (dist.female.first) is 146k and the male names
file (dist.male.first) is 41k. The files contain the name, the
frequency, the cummulative frequency, and its rank. There is another file
on the site that explains their numbers. An example of the files follows:
-------First ten entries in dist.female.first
name freq cum.freq rank
MARY 2.629 2.629 1
PATRICIA 1.073 3.702 2
LINDA 1.035 4.736 3
BARBARA 0.980 5.716 4
ELIZABETH 0.937 6.653 5
JENNIFER 0.932 7.586 6
MARIA 0.828 8.414 7
SUSAN 0.794 9.209 8
MARGARET 0.768 9.976 9
DOROTHY 0.727 10.703 10
First ten entries in dist.male.first
name freq cum.freq rank
JAMES 3.318 3.318 1
JOHN 3.271 6.589 2
ROBERT 3.143 9.732 3
MICHAEL 2.629 12.361 4
WILLIAM 2.451 14.812 5
DAVID 2.363 17.176 6
RICHARD 1.703 18.878 7
CHARLES 1.523 20.401 8
JOSEPH 1.404 21.805 9
THOMAS 1.380 23.185 10
----
Greg Roberts
Gregory F. Roberts
Georgetown University
robertsg@gusun.georgetown.edu
www.georgetown.edu/users/robertsg