Zelma
16,936 recorded births · active 1880–2025
Compare Zelma →Living-age distribution
The median living Zelma is 76. If you meet a Zelma, there's about a 70% chance they're between 56 and 89 years old.
Popularity arc
Peak Zelma: 1904. Down 99% from peak.
Projected: the dashed 10-year forecast (Holt damped-trend exponential smoothing, fit to recent years), with a shaded 95% interval.
Gender balance
Zelma is almost always given to female babies — 99.8% female.
Rarity
Zelma ranks #2,045 out of 105,966 names ever recorded by the SSA.
Geographic fingerprint
Zelmas are 1.8x more common in the South than the national average.
Predictive modeling
Three statistical models, all fit to Zelma's own SSA history plus the historical behavior of every other name in the dataset.
Peak popularity prediction
Zelma's modeled peak was #324 in 1902 — its trend isn't projected to beat that.
Projects the trend forward, then converts share into rank using this year's popularity distribution.
This forecasts Zelma's share of births by fitting a damped-trend model to its last 139 years of data and projecting 10 years forward with a widening uncertainty band. Each projected share is then translated into a rank by comparing it against 2025's actual name-popularity distribution — so the model implicitly assumes the overall shape of that distribution doesn't shift much over the forecast window. Its trend is projected to stay below its historic best over the next 10 years, so the model treats 1902 as its peak. Milestone probabilities come from how much of each year's uncertainty band clears that milestone's rank, combined across years as if they were independent — which slightly overstates the odds for names sitting right at a threshold, since a good year is usually followed by another good year rather than an independent coin flip.Name life-cycle stage
A rule-based classifier over recent growth, momentum, and peak proximity.
Zelma peaked in 1904 and now sits at roughly 1% of that peak, 121 years later — a name that was genuinely common once, now mostly heard from an older generation.
Popularity survival model
Once a name reaches a rank tier, how long does it typically stay there before falling out?
Built from a Kaplan-Meier survival curve: every historical run any name has ever had above this tier, with runs still ongoing today counted as still in progress rather than as an exit.Zelma isn't currently in the Top 100 tier. Estimated chance of entering it in the forecast window: 0%.
If Zelma enters Top 100, chance it's still there after:
Names that do enter Top 100 have historically stayed a median of ~19 years. Based on 668 historical Top 100 runs across every name in the dataset.