Who creates RareBoyNames.com?
RareBoyNames.com is created and edited by Don St Germain. Don is not presented as a linguist, historian or professional baby-name consultant. The site is built around careful curation, transparent U.S. popularity data, clear sourcing and a willingness to separate measurable facts from personal style judgments.
Don also creates and edits RareGirlNames.com. The two sites share the same research standards and technical data approach, but their guides are written for their own search intent rather than copied and gender-swapped.
Meet your guide
Why Roscoe the Raccoon?
A raccoon felt right for a site about finding overlooked names. Raccoons are curious, memorable and always seem to be searching for something. Roscoe adds the alliteration, and the name itself is a vintage choice that remains genuinely uncommon in current U.S. data.
A site for finding names, not scoring your own
The main purpose here is discovery. You can search by style, origin, length and current popularity, take the quiz, then save names to a browser-only shortlist. We keep that purpose separate from HowRareIsYourName.com, which is designed around investigating the rarity of a name you already have in mind.
How the popularity data is used
When we make a measurable U.S. rarity claim, we use the Social Security Administration national baby-name archive through 2025. Each spelling is treated separately, and names with fewer than five occurrences for a sex in a year are not published in the national file.
That means a name can feel unusual without being statistically rare, and a traditional name can be genuinely rare in current U.S. use. The 2025 Rare Boy Names Report shows what that long tail looks like across the complete published male-name file.
How origins, meanings and pronunciations are handled
Name history is often messier than a one-word origin label. A form can move through several languages, spelling traditions and cultures over centuries. We prefer cautious wording when an etymology is disputed and use language-specific references where practical, especially for Welsh, Irish, Scottish, French and Greek names.
Our research standards explain how we separate popularity data, editorial style, origin claims and pronunciation guidance.
Why the lists stay focused
A list is more helpful when every name has a reason to be there. We would rather publish a focused guide with useful context than thousands of nearly empty name pages or an enormous unexplained database. The quiz and shortlist follow the same idea: help you narrow the field instead of simply making it longer.
What makes this site different from a giant name database?
RareBoyNames.com is deliberately guide-first. A database can tell you that a spelling exists, but parents usually need more help than that. We organize names by the way people actually search: heritage, sound, length, style and measurable rarity. The goal is to explain why a name belongs on a page, show enough popularity context to avoid misleading labels and make it easy to move from a broad idea to a manageable shortlist.
That also means we do not generate thousands of individual name pages just because the data makes it technically possible. New pages should have a distinct search intent and enough original context to be worth indexing.
How we think about trust
Baby-name research mixes facts and taste. Birth counts can be measured. A pronunciation can be checked. An origin can often be researched. Whether a name feels handsome, cool or spooky is subjective. We try to make those boundaries visible instead of presenting every sentence with the same level of certainty.
When a page uses current U.S. popularity, the year is stated. When an origin is more complicated than one neat label, the wording should reflect that. And when a category is editorial, the page says so. That approach matters more to us than making every name sound dramatic or perfectly certain.
Corrections are welcome
If a data point, origin note, pronunciation or broken link needs attention, use the contact page. A correction is most useful when it includes the page URL, the exact claim and a source we can review.