Perfect Scores: Why 10,157 Names Average Five Stars

Somewhere on this site is a name with a flawless rating: five stars, no dissenters, a perfect 5.0 average. In fact there are 10,157 of them — out of 21,247 rated names, nearly half the entire catalogue wears a perfect score.

Before you conclude that baby-name voters are the most positive people on the internet, look at the denominators.

Perfect is mostly a small-numbers costume

Of the 10,157 perfect names, 9,000 have five votes or fewer. A full 4,256 of them have exactly one vote — one visitor, one five-star click, a lifetime average of 5.0. (For scale: 5,099 names in the whole system have exactly one vote, total.) The "perfect score" leaderboard is, in other words, mostly a list of names almost nobody has rated yet.

Here is the shape of the whole system:

The overall average — 4.52 stars across 161,918 votes — tells you voters are warm (this is a site where people rate names they're considering, not products they're furious at). But watch what happens as the votes accumulate: the perfect scores evaporate. Only 321 names have 50 or more votes, only 22 have 100 or more, and at those denominators a 5.0 average is essentially impossible to hold. Every heavily rated name collects its share of one- and two-star verdicts, because a name with real exposure is a name some people genuinely dislike. Perfection is what a rating looks like before the public arrives.

The second illusion: the stars you see aren't the average

Even a name that has earned a real average doesn't display it. This site's star widget rounds a name's average to whole stars before showing it. Which produces pairings like this:

• Olivia — 100 votes, average 4.50 — displays as ★★★★★
• Aria — 52 votes, average 4.90 — displays as ★★★★★

Same badge, meaningfully different verdicts. Olivia's 4.50 is the rounding boundary itself: half the votes' worth of imperfection, rounded up into a perfect-looking row of stars. If you read only the stars, Olivia and Aria are equals. If you read the average and the vote count, one of them is nearly perfect and battle-tested, and the other is a strong name with a genuine minority of detractors. Both facts are useful; the stars alone hide one of them.

How to read any rating, anywhere

This site's numbers are just a clean specimen of a universal pattern:

1. Denominator first. A 5.0 average on 4 votes is a shrug wearing a tuxedo. A 4.6 on 300 votes is a real signal. Never quote an average without its count.
2. Small samples can't be "perfect" for long. Each new vote can only keep a 5.0 alive or kill it; it can never raise it. Perfect averages are melting by construction.
3. Displayed stars are a rounding, not a measurement. Averages live on a continuum; badges live in buckets. The gap between 4.50 and 4.90 is real information that a five-star icon throws away.
4. High averages say something about the room, too. People rate names they already like, on a site for people who love names. A 4.52 global average measures the voters as much as the names.

So yes — 10,157 names here are "perfect." Almost all of them are perfect the way an unplayed team is undefeated. The interesting names are the ones still standing near the top after the votes — and the skepticism — have had their say.

See the real averages, with counts, on the name pages themselves: Olivia and Aria are the pair this article keeps coming back to.

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Source: U.S. Social Security Administration · Data through 2025 · Updated 2026