super interesting, although i think the data could be presented in a significantly more readable way. at the very least, they could be sorted alphabetically or something within their groupings.
each name's specific page is also pretty cool, but the "similar names" is not working so good (or i do not understand how they are determining what is "similar"). names similar to 'Dee' includes: Mickey, Cosme, Clair, Guy, Glenn..?
I knew a dude with a traditionally female name because his parents were peak wasp and thought that was cool. Middling software engineer. Great bullshitter and talker generally. Dude ALWAYS made it past the HR resume screen stage.
Except it didn't "flip" until 2004. It was also was never really a boys name. In 1990 there were 30 M Aryas and 6 Fs. Prior to 1982 it doesn't occur at all in the SSA data. The very first year that there were more than 100 Aryas total (2002), there were 54 Fs and 79 Ms.
> Of the 42 names that moved toward girls, 34 were driven mainly by an increase among girls, rather than a decline among boys.
> Surprisingly, the same pattern held in the opposite direction. Of the 12 names that moved toward boys, 9 shifted mainly because fewer girls were receiving them, rather than because more boys were. In other words, whichever way a name moved, the biggest change usually came from girls.
This is consistent with the observation that girl's names are more dynamic.
It seems there are lots of cases across the board where "women adopt traditionally male thing" has become the norm in this timeframe but not many where "men adopt traditionally female thing" at quite the same rate or scale.
That is the pattern. Rarely would you have a baby boy using a women's name. Broadly speaking there is a general stigma within society going the other direction then women adopting male things.
The simple explanation is that parents don't want to give their sons gender-ambiguous names, but are more open to it for daughters. This is consistent with all of the dynamics described in the article.
> This is consistent with the observation that girl's names are more dynamic.
Interesting, I wonder what causes this? In the US, is more common to name the first son after the father. Given this data comes from US social security information, that definitely has an impact.
I have no data but feel that boys tend to get the family names and biblical names (in US anyways). It's rare to hear of a girl named Elizabeth III or Mary Junior but quite common for boys. So I think the boy names are heavily weighted on probably the most popular ~25 or so names. So girl names are more free to follow whatever is fashionable at the time, trends move faster.
Anecdata: I’m a guy and a III. My son almost was a IV but we chose another first name and used my (and my dad’s and my grandfather’s) name for his middle name. My great grandfather had a different name, but I think his dad and maybe grandfather had the same name as me.
I’d agree the trend is waning if that’s what you’re getting at but I think it is baked into the history of this dataset and is also still significantly more common for boys than girls
Also, IV is really quite rare for boys too. Junior still super common.
On some forms in the US, it's listed as a suffix. Some agencies enforce it, others do not (SSA does not, for example). And colloquially, when"Senior" dies, the son often stops using "Junior" (though that's not a legal change).
UK, Can, and AUS are similar, but not exactly the same as the US. And NSW in AUS complicates matters by outright prohibiting roman numberals are Jnr/Snr suffixes. Mexico has more restrictions due to the mothers-last-name, fathers-last-name naming convention.
Personally, I dig the Nordic and Arabic "x, son of y, son of z, son of..." patterns.
Not so long. My grandfather, born 1908 in Norway, kept the proper patronym as a middle name since he would otherwise have the same full name as his father. Everyone had to take fixed last names by 1923, but it wasn't uncommon to keep the patronym as a middle name like my grandfather did.
How the heck can one state of Australia prohibit certain types of names? Doesn't that cause all kinds of problems with documentation mismatches if someone moves?
They don’t change names when they move. The names are registered in the location of birth.
But your name might get mangled in some states if it doesn’t fit, same as it might in the US if some system doesn’t properly handle, e.g., multiple middle names or special punctuation.
My first and middle names are John and Richard. A couple of times on trips to the US people have read my initials as 'Jr'. Very surprising the first time! Has never happened to me in the UK.
I have Junior in my legal name - it's the bane of my existence when it comes to legal forms because of how inconsistent various systems handle it, even for different government systems. This became especially true after 9/11 and the Patriot Act pushed these systems to update and go digital because they couldn't get their act together to coordinate for years.
Ferenc Puskás the Hungarian footballer had grown up with the nickname Öcsi, meaning little brother. Later when he got old he was referred to as Puskás Öcsi bácsi, meaning Uncle Little Brother Puskás...
Not to offend, but I think it has declined because this naming of Jr, III, and so on has come to be associated with poor or rural people. For what it’s worth, I have a relative who is a IV
This appears not to have been rigorously studied. Anecdotally, the further west one goes in America the higher the likelihood a suffix indicates low SES.
Well it’s likely the adoption by the Latinx. I think they demo grows as you move west. In Texas it’s become more common in that demo and the redneck whites. The monied still have it but more commonly go towards super preppy names like Tripp, Shep, Archer, Preston. A common theme I see if you dig deeper is they name one of the boys the mom’s maiden surname. But in general, surnames as first names is very common in this demo.
Eh, in my experience it’s all over the place. Scottsdale’s suffixes are largely not Latin. Instead, it probably indicates someone who sells real estate or crypto.
Fun part is that no one can stop poor people from imitating rich ones, so they do. Then rich ones start coming up with other ways to show to the others that they’re rich and poor copy over and over again.
I used rich as shorthand placeholder of blue blood, noble, famous and rich. Not everyone who is rich is noble and noble doesn’t mean they are rich.
There have historically been a lot of ways poor people were stopped from imitating rich ones, and not just the obvious ones involving spending money. The US is pretty enlightened in that there are no name protection laws that I know of. In many European countries, you still need permission from every carrier of a rare last name if you want to take it.
I thought girls didn't use junior, III, etc. because traditionally girls adopt their husband's last name, so they would no longer have the same full name as their mother.
She didn't get the suffix until her 20s. And it was not used to distinguish her from her mother (who was also a Queen Elizabeth) but from yet another Elizabeth who lived centuries earlier.
Same with the current king Charles III of England. He is the first of that name to be king of the UK (and Canada, Australia, etc). Maybe people should revert to multiple ordinals, like James VI and I in 1603.
> I have no data but feel that boys tend to get the family names and biblical names (in US anyways).
Or both: the family names having been chosen originally from biblical names, but not continuing for that reason.
I'm a David, and there were many Davids in my University intake year, but I suspect that has less to do with the Bible and more to do with mothers of a certain age range having interests in the Davids Bowie or Essex (or both! - quite possible in my mother's case).
Names, appearance, gender-related behavior is generally more fluid for females in America currently.
A different somewhat topic-related comment: I have a friend named Darakshan -- he took up his Sufi name (his birth name was David). Darakshan is generally considered a female name in Persian-Urdu culture -- I don't know whether he and his American Sufi friends who gave him that name were aware of that ... not that it matters; it does suit him. ("Bright," "shining," "radiant," "brilliant," or "luminous")
I was thinking about this in terms of products recently. Gendered products tend to move from men to women, but rarely the other way around. High heels, Chuck Taylors, motorcycles, etc.
Some products do move the other way but it is a slow process: massages, wet wipes (Dude Wipes anyone?), manicures, etc. But I think a good majority of products marketed to women have a much harder time crossing over.
Not sure if this is universal, but when my wife and I were thinking about naming our son, we observed that in Spain there seems to be much more variety of girl than boy names.
In fact, you can almost prove it by bijective mapping to a subset. Almost all typical boy names have a feminine version (Juan->Juana, Carlos->Carla/Carlota, Manuel->Manuela, Adrián->Adriana, and so on... there are some exceptions, but not many) while the opposite is not true, there are plenty of common girl names without masculine version (Laura, Marta, Elena, Carmen, Sara, and many others).
There are also papers doing the actual stats and concluding that girl names are more diverse. No idea what the reason is.
In many western cultures [1] it was (still is, but to a much lesser degree) customary for boy's (especially for the eldest) names to be hereditary. This gives natural tendency for the set of "traditional" boy names to be self reinforcing: remain more closed and maintain relative relevance. There are simply less boys to play with naming.
On top of that, it was common for the eldest son to inherit the estate and produce more offspring, while the younger were much more likely to be enlisted and as a result suffer from early-adulthood mortality. This further reinforces the traditional names.
I wonder how these statistics would look like if it was possible to control for these effects. Maybe look at variety of names among fallen soldiers versus the general population with some time lag?
> Almost all typical boy names have a feminine version
If I were to warrant a guess, I would say this is to quite a large degree an effect of the first-born being a girl and getting a feminized version of the hereditary name.
As somebody born with the name Steven I'm curious about the relative popularity of "Steven" vs. "Stephen".
I feel like when I was a child more people were present with a PH, but nowadas virtually nobody. Most of the Stephens I know are "old", and I think "Steve" won.
But no doubt it varies on country, and who you know.
(I legally changed my name from Steven to Steve, a couple of years ago, because it was the only name I'd ever used and it got too tiresome dealing with my official passport, and ID saying one name when I signed/wrote another name on all my official paperwork. To the extent that employers would book flights in one name but my passport was in the other name, cue much hilarity at boarding time..)
My biggest WTF on this (as a foreigner) was the late Lindsey Graham. I always knew Lindsey/Lindsay as a female name.
Either way, peeking through the list, seems to me names which end with a vowel are usually feminine. However, there's a caveat: names end up shortened, and over time even those get shortened.
'Brit', 'Britney' for 'Brittany'.
'Gerry' or 'Geri' or 'Ger' for 'Gareth' (Dutch variant: 'Gerrit'),
'Pat', 'Patty' for 'Patrick', 'Patricia'.
'Pen', 'Penny' for 'Penelope'
'Ash' for 'Ashley'.
'Tash' or 'Tasha' for 'Natasha', 'Nata(s)cha' (a variant of Nathan/Nathaniel?)
'Toni', 'Tony', or 'Ton' for 'Antonia', 'Anton', or 'Antonius'.
Skimming through the quick examples I came up with, one thing stands out: if it ends with an 'a', feminine. I believe this stems from Latin? It also appears Brittany is a very British example, whereas say 'Tony' stems from a Catholic background. People with that background get very traditional names, but they're always practically shortened. Annoyingly, you'd have to mention your complete name on say a form, but otherwise you get a wider choice since you have like three names, and they're relatively long so more variety to pick from.
Andrea, Simone, Nicola, Michele, Daniele in Italian are all male names, but English speakers would probably assume the person is female from the name alone.
True, good native and traditional cultutal exceptions of a rule of thumb. Speaking for myself (NL) we have a small amount of Italian names and heritage (also due to Catholicism), and say NYC would have much more Italian descendants.
Also, as someone who saw quite some football (non-US version), I ofcourse am familiar with a lot of names. For example, Andrea Pirlo. We also learn some via history at school, since Italy plays a prominent role in Europe's history. Regarding Nicola, people might be familiar with Nikola Tesla (the 'c' in this case, sounds like 'k') and it is just a variant of 'Nico', 'Nicole', 'Nicolas'. Then there's some dude at FIFA, 'Gianni' which is a variant of 'Jean', 'Jan', 'Jeanne', 'Janet', 'Jannie', 'Janine', etc. I could go on about Gianluigi Buffon...
What I just remind myself with regards to Italian is it tends to add a vowel at end of a word or name, but it often doesn't sound same in English or my native tongue (Dutch).
My name is Daniele (I'm from Italy), and I've been living in NY for a while. My real estate attorney name was Daniele as well (she's a woman,) it was extremely confusing at closing time.
Also, fun fact, I got invited to a ton Women in Tech stuff. I even got recruited to a company that was proud of having > 50% women in their teams. I assume that was because I was working on an OSS project (Chromium) and I had no avatar there.
> Andrea (on-dre-ah vs and-ree-ah) is a true name collision.
What do you mean? The Italian male name Andrea and the English female name Andrea aren't unrelated names that happen to be spelled the same way. They are one and the same name, both derived from the Greek word for "man"; the Italian name has managed to remember that it's overtly masculine and the English name has forgotten this.
Both are pretty rare now, but Danielle is the more common spelling. It also matches the way the -elle is used as a suffix in many diminutives (e.g., cervelle, ruelle, passerelle)
Is -elle still a living suffix in French? I was under the impression that -ette is the standard.
-elle is pretty clearly descended from one of the usual Latin diminutives (also visible in e.g. Spanish tortilla). -ette seems to come from a much rarer one?
They are only indirectly derived from the word "andros" = man.
They are directly derived from the feminine Greek word "andreia", meaning "courage" or "virility", which had been derived from "andros", as supposedly a quality typical for males.
It is the Italian name which has forgotten that originally it was a feminine word, not the English, which has preserved the original grammatical gender.
In Indo-European languages, most of the nouns denoting qualities have the feminine grammatical gender, so "andreia" is not an exception.
> It is the Italian name which has forgotten that originally it was a feminine word, not the English, which has preserved the original grammatical gender.
That's not really what I said. The name is a masculine name. You can name your son "virility" without problems. If you try to do that to your daughter, you're going to have problems. The grammatical gender of the word is a separate concern.
And virility literally means manliness or manhood, and by extension physical qualities ideally associated with men. Romans had another concept, virtue, for manly mental qualities. Ancient Greek "andreia" covered both aspects of manliness.
Andrea as a female name is similar to Carla or Caroline. Take a name that means something related to men (but no longer obviously so) and adjust it a bit to make it a female name. As a male name it just reflects changes in pronunciation over time.
> I don't know any women named Daniele or men named Danielle.
I wouldn’t be surprise to meet a (female) Daniele. The second L is already dropped somewhat regularly in Michelle. Which is interesting because it came from the French, but since then the French spelling drifted to "Michèle" (and then more or less fell completely out of fashion, and then seemed to come back for a while). In any case, both are pronounced exactly the same way.
In general, English speakers seem not to be used to pronounce a word that ends with a non-silent letter e. Every time they pronounce my name like Danielle, I tell them it's Daniele (dah-NYEH-leh), and they go: dan-YELL, right? I tell them to say Daniel/Dani or anything that gets my attention. They seem to care more about the correct pronunciation of my name then I do, and then they botch it badly. :D
Many other Italian words that end with the letter E are changed to I, or mispronounced.
Ends in 'a' = female: a relatively safe assumption, as far as an assumption here can be safe, with no other context. A strong majority in many places will match that. Many of the exceptions will be obviously foreign names, which can go either way (may follow that culture's patterns, may not, highly varied).
Ends in vowel = female: probably mostly true, in that it may be >50%, but it's unreliable enough that I'd avoid trying to base any assumptions off it.
Names really follow no rules at all here. For both good and bad. E.g. most recently I ran across a "La-sia" pronounced "ladashsia". If it's spelled vat-ik'Nff and pronounced "King George" and they're female, then that's what's correct.
Those names were longer in their original form, so none of them ended in "-a", but in English one or more letters were dropped, resulting in the "-a" termination.
E.g. Ezra was Esdras in Greek and in Hebrew it probably ended in "-ahu", while Elisha was Eliseus in Greek and in Hebrew it ended in ayin after the "-a-".
I mostly agree, but for example Andrea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea is a masculine name in Italian and a feminine name in Spanish. Here in Argentina it's mostly masculine, but if someone has many Italian ancestors, it may be masculine.
> It is part of the Italian male names ending in a, some others being Elia (Elias), Enea (Aeneas), Luca (Lucas), Mattia (Matthias), Nicola (Nicholas), Tobia (Tobias).
> Ends in 'a' = female: a relatively safe assumption, as far as an assumption here can be safe, with no other context. A strong majority in many places will match that.
Which places? I guess I ask because your next sentence:
> Many of the exceptions will be obviously foreign names with traditional spelling
Which makes me wonder if you meant "US places", because I can think of a few male names, which maybe categorised as "foreign" if you're in the US, that end in "a".
e.g. Csaba (pronounced "Chubba") is a reasonably common Hungarian name.
And some not so "foreign" ones, albeit mostly with Biblical roots, like Joshua and Ezra.
The names with Biblical roots did not end in -a in their original form, but in most cases their termination was "-ah". The final consonant was usually dropped in English, resulting in the "-a" termination.
Lindsey (as well as Ashley, Tracy, Kelly, among others) are all, I believe, last names that became given names. They skewed female over time because they end with a vowel.
Ashley Williams is the name of two American actresses as well as two male soccer players (Welsh and Liberian) and a male boxer (also Welsh).
When I was a kid, I was very confused by the names of Fleetwood Mac band members. It really threw me for a loop that they had a Lindsay who is a dude, and a Stevie who is a girl, both counter to my intuition about names.
> Stevie is Stephanie which has always been very much a girl's name. Abbreviations have a tendency to collide.
Maybe, I guess. That would be one of those "abbreviations" like "Peggy" ("abbreviating" Margaret) that doesn't actually abbreviate the name, and you just have to know that someone out there thinks it's related.
"Stevie" for "Steven" follows the ordinary rules of English. For "Stephanie", you'd expect "Steffie".
My classmate's older brother was named Ashley, and the story was that when he showed up at the state university he was assigned to a female dorm / floor.
IDK about the politician, but I bet 80% of the Lindsey’s out there are named after the Fleetwood Mac guitarist, so obviously that name transcend any petty gender limitations.
Yes, it stems from Latin. See Latin's case declension tables [0]
In Spanish and Portugese, -a is a feminine suffix and -o is masculine; that's where we get Patricio vs Patricia.
There are very few female names that end with -o and very few male names that end with -a in Spanish.
Another example is -ine in Joseph/Josephine. -ine/-ino/-in is a feminizing suffix in German and a diminutive in Spanish and French, that's why it's a femenine suffix in names. In English we have hero vs heroine.
In the case of Elizabeth, it was likely just so common at one time that many variants were needed. Also Mary (you mightn't think there are many variants of Mary, but, for instance, Polly is a variant of Mary. Figure that one out.) At one time, pretty much every family in Ireland had at _least_ one child called Mary. Sometimes more than one. This ultimately resulted in Ireland having two consecutive presidents called Mary (and in the 2011 election, which lead to Ireland's first non-Mary president in 20 years, two of the candidates were also called Mary or variants thereof). The Marys have now largely aged out, and there were no candidates called Mary at all in the most recent election.
Chris, Kris, or Cris can be short for Christina, Kristina, Kristofer, Christopher, Kristian, Kristian, Christy, Krista, or Kristi. Sometimes you'll see Crys, Chris, Krys, Kris, or Cris for Crystal/Cristal/Chrystal/Krystal.
You'll also sometimes see Christopher shortened to Topher or to Kit.
> Gerry is also short for Gerald sometimes.
>
> Tony in the US is often short for Anthony.
These two are incredibly common in the UK. You will occasionally see Ant (as in And & Dec TV presenters) but almost no one uses Anthony, they are usually all Tonys.
The female short names is usually spelt Toni, but pronounced the same.
A name I was surprised by was someone I know naming their daughter Miles/Myles, which is such a male name in my mind. It might even be based on the Latin word for soldier. It's not one I've seen used for a girl anywhere else, yet.
I'm obviously a biased source, but I metaphorically keep the Vorkosigan books [0] in a similar place with (the more-famous) Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. Fun reads to return to that I find very quotable.
Interestingly, the first few books are about Miles' parents, but it's neat to see what the most popular character does/doesn't inherit.
Not sure if they person you know is a millennial, but I have noticed of this (my) generation that they love not only gender-ambiguous names, but to name girls with decidedly male-coded names.
>> From Old French given name Milo, of problematic origin, possibly from an unknown Germanic element, or a short form of Slavic names beginning with mil- "grace, favor". The English form is associated by folk etymology with Latin mīles ("soldier").
It would be nice to know that the Old French name didn't secretly happen to match the hypothetical Old French form of the Latin word for soldier. I sadly don't personally know how to check what form miles, militis would have taken in Old French.
A good heuristic, though, is that if the French name had come from this very common Latin word, someone would have already thought of that (as has in fact happened many times) and it would have been thoroughly investigated. The evidence in support must be somewhere between "wafer-thin" and "robustly contradicted by the known sound changes from Latin to French".
I guess it's eternally stuck in the 90s. I didn't see Perl in a long time now. 10-15 years ago it was still everywhere.
edit: No, it's stuck in the 80s: "The data comes from a 5% sampling of Social Security card applications with dates of birth from January 1980 through December 1989"
> It is a good idea to apply for your child's Social Security number and birth certificate at birth. If you apply at the hospital, the state agency that issues birth certificates will share your child's information with us. Then, we will mail the Social Security card to you. If you wait to apply, there may be delays while we verify your child's birth certificate.
But Jean (English name, like Jeannie) and Jean (French form of John) are entirely different names, with different pronunciations, that happen to share the same spelling.
I am curious how you define "entirely different", because where I am looking, all the names you mention have parallel etymologies, the same origins, and similar meanings. We find them with different pronounciations and many spellings, because of the regional languages spoken, but they were adopted into a multitude of languages from the same sources. So how do you consider them "entirely different"?
In the past there were no hard associations between sexes and gender and it was possible to find boys wearing some pink clothing, but it was never the case that people associated pink with boys and blue with girls.
There are some limited examples that contribute to the misunderstanding. For example blue is often associated with the Virgin Mary and red (not pink) was considered a manly color often worn by warriors (e.g. the British, the Romans, etc).
It’s easy to confirm that what you’re saying is not so. Ask AI and you'll get specific citations of pink being recommended for boys in the early 20th century: “in the early 1900s, publication guides and trade journals—such as the June 1918 issue of Earnshaw's Infants' Department—recommended pink for boys and blue for girls.”
There are a few names I think are being confused. Jan, short for Janice is a female name, but Jan in Central / Eastern Europe as a form of John is masculine. Jean the female name and Jean the french male name are different.
I think that's an example of what he's talking about. Jean-Luc is pronounced "John Luke" whereas the feminine form is Gene. And similarly the male Jan is pronounced Yan.
I am not a native English or French speaker but the way I've heard Luke being said in UK/US English and the way I have heard the filmmaker's name pronounced that Luc doesn't really sound like Luke. I feel the u and c are shorter and subdued.
Yeah Jean is pronounced more like 'Jawn' but I just mean it's a clearly male name in either case, as opposed to Jean pronounced 'Gene' which is generally a female name, though oddly 'Gene' also pronounced the same is generally a male name.
I was going to say the same about Jean; I think that one at least is hard to really draw conclusions from without additional data like languages spoken at home.
Anecdotally, the boy->girl names are almost all very popular names where I've met multiple each of those across different ages, whereas the other two categories feel like they have a lot more down-list entries.
Very likely it's their family name. Kim is the most common family name in Korea. Most Korean given names are two characters (=2 syllables) and more difficult to pronounce and memorize for westerners. And because of the space inserted between two romanized syllables (Jong Un), they are often misunderstood as middle + given names.
In Britain we had the very famous MI6 Intelligence office Kim Philby who was also a Russian spy, he was a key part of the Cambridge Five spy ring.
What I didn't know until just now is Kim was just a nickname. He was Harold Adrian Russell Philby and apparently Nicknamed "Kim" after the boy-spy in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim[2] which surely foreshadowed his career!!
Kim is the name of the protagonist of one of the most popular boys' novels of all time, and there are a number of examples of well known male Kims from the twentieth century.
Interestingly if I remember correctly they have different origins, Maria is a biblical name, while Mario comes from Latin (which can decline Marius to Maria, but that’s a different word)
Came here to say the same. Anyone doing data visualization should think long and hard before using something beside a line or bar chart. Almost everything else is worse in multiple ways.
To my Irish ear, these are two completely different names, not even slightly similar. (They're also etymologically unrelated.) It blew my mind when discussions on r/namenerds revealed that many Americans consider these names similar or even identical.
For most of my (male) life, people misspelled my name Aaron as Erin fairly regularly. I think that has contributed to the confusion. I also used to get Arron, Airon, and other variants. The "A-A-Ron" skit has made a noticeable difference in recent years.
I suspect this is a big driver of the switch. Parents that do not want to give their boys a name that will cause issues later on.
Back in school it wasn't a problem, people knew "Loren" was male, "Lauren" was female. Now, an awful lot of people don't. It's an uncommon enough name that even if you were around back when that's how it worked you very well might not have known it.
As an adult I routinely get misgendered, but it's a so-what to me.
Loren adjacent. In high school my girlfriend was Lauren and mine is Lorin. Friends over pronounced our names to differentiate. It doesn’t bother me to get misgendered, either. It never lasts past hearing my voice or seeing me, though.
As someone with an pretty unusual name, I think kids will always find a reason to make fun of you and it isn't always just the name.
True Story: My mom was a 2nd grade teacher for 30 years and in the 70s had a student with very 'hippie" style parents. They named their son Log Cabin. You can imagine how that went over in elementary school.
Hilary is an interesting case because, in the data the article is looking at, there are only 5 total years where there were more M Hilarys than Fs: 1936-1941. And even in 1936 the M:F Ratio was only 28:9 (that's not a reduced fraction; the total count was 37). If it's true that Hilary was once a popular boys name, the evidence for that claim is not in the SSA data.
I was very much shocked to see a feminine version of my name used IIRC on Dead Or Alive 4 (DOA4), not knowing the backstory: I think it was a character called Leon was promising to avenge his dead girlfriend, Rolande.
I've wondered if the women that have carried the name have liked it? In my mind, it's always sounded very blunt so as to be feminine, but I recognize I'm heavily biased when it comes to my own name.
I’d be curious if men with female names get rejected out of a lot of job interviews since the employer may have thought they chose a female for DEI and then a man shows up?
Most interesting thing that stands out to me is the number of names that appear to be what I would consider an abbreviation of a more traditional name.
e.g. “Pat” is cited, but doesn’t specify whether that refers to Patricia or Patrick.
I don't know why but the very specific episodes of when he buys a convertible and when he gets his friend to break his video game addiction still live rent free in my head. I can't remember anything else about the series.
Parker Lewis came out during my blunder Years, he was a role model. He was that kid just a few years older who had it all figured out. I buttoned my shirts to the adam's apple like Parker Lewis. I styled my hair like him.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadeach name's specific page is also pretty cool, but the "similar names" is not working so good (or i do not understand how they are determining what is "similar"). names similar to 'Dee' includes: Mickey, Cosme, Clair, Guy, Glenn..?
Not that I'm bitter or anything
> Surprisingly, the same pattern held in the opposite direction. Of the 12 names that moved toward boys, 9 shifted mainly because fewer girls were receiving them, rather than because more boys were. In other words, whichever way a name moved, the biggest change usually came from girls.
This is consistent with the observation that girl's names are more dynamic.
e.g. you have "toys" and "girl toys". "clothes" and "girl clothes" and such. It's not everywhere or everything but there is a trend.
We really don’t.
And shouldn’t.
Why that is the case is another question.
Interesting, I wonder what causes this? In the US, is more common to name the first son after the father. Given this data comes from US social security information, that definitely has an impact.
Also, IV is really quite rare for boys too. Junior still super common.
How does that work when they’re 60 with grandkids?
On some forms in the US, it's listed as a suffix. Some agencies enforce it, others do not (SSA does not, for example). And colloquially, when"Senior" dies, the son often stops using "Junior" (though that's not a legal change).
UK, Can, and AUS are similar, but not exactly the same as the US. And NSW in AUS complicates matters by outright prohibiting roman numberals are Jnr/Snr suffixes. Mexico has more restrictions due to the mothers-last-name, fathers-last-name naming convention.
Personally, I dig the Nordic and Arabic "x, son of y, son of z, son of..." patterns.
Long obsolete except in Iceland.
But your name might get mangled in some states if it doesn’t fit, same as it might in the US if some system doesn’t properly handle, e.g., multiple middle names or special punctuation.
My first and middle names are John and Richard. A couple of times on trips to the US people have read my initials as 'Jr'. Very surprising the first time! Has never happened to me in the UK.
And it's not even part of his legal name.
> How does that work when they’re 60 with grandkids?
They get called "grandpa" like everyone else with grandchildren.
I used rich as shorthand placeholder of blue blood, noble, famous and rich. Not everyone who is rich is noble and noble doesn’t mean they are rich.
Or both: the family names having been chosen originally from biblical names, but not continuing for that reason.
I'm a David, and there were many Davids in my University intake year, but I suspect that has less to do with the Bible and more to do with mothers of a certain age range having interests in the Davids Bowie or Essex (or both! - quite possible in my mother's case).
That seems like a really awkward way to describe the observation.
Wouldn’t the “same” pattern be if the increase was due to greater uptake in the opposite sex.
The linguist in me can't decide if girl names are more dynamic (there are more options) or less dynamic (they don't get used for boys as often).
A different somewhat topic-related comment: I have a friend named Darakshan -- he took up his Sufi name (his birth name was David). Darakshan is generally considered a female name in Persian-Urdu culture -- I don't know whether he and his American Sufi friends who gave him that name were aware of that ... not that it matters; it does suit him. ("Bright," "shining," "radiant," "brilliant," or "luminous")
Some products do move the other way but it is a slow process: massages, wet wipes (Dude Wipes anyone?), manicures, etc. But I think a good majority of products marketed to women have a much harder time crossing over.
In fact, you can almost prove it by bijective mapping to a subset. Almost all typical boy names have a feminine version (Juan->Juana, Carlos->Carla/Carlota, Manuel->Manuela, Adrián->Adriana, and so on... there are some exceptions, but not many) while the opposite is not true, there are plenty of common girl names without masculine version (Laura, Marta, Elena, Carmen, Sara, and many others).
There are also papers doing the actual stats and concluding that girl names are more diverse. No idea what the reason is.
Comrade Adam is keeping an eye on the lists and is posting highlights whenever new names are approved: https://kammeratadam.dk/keyword/godkendtefornavne
A name that really begs to be screamed out loud
What? The state gets to choose which name can you freely give your child?
In many western cultures [1] it was (still is, but to a much lesser degree) customary for boy's (especially for the eldest) names to be hereditary. This gives natural tendency for the set of "traditional" boy names to be self reinforcing: remain more closed and maintain relative relevance. There are simply less boys to play with naming.
On top of that, it was common for the eldest son to inherit the estate and produce more offspring, while the younger were much more likely to be enlisted and as a result suffer from early-adulthood mortality. This further reinforces the traditional names.
I wonder how these statistics would look like if it was possible to control for these effects. Maybe look at variety of names among fallen soldiers versus the general population with some time lag?
> Almost all typical boy names have a feminine version
If I were to warrant a guess, I would say this is to quite a large degree an effect of the first-born being a girl and getting a feminized version of the hereditary name.
[1]: https://xkcd.com/285/
Moon Unit is a girls name.
Stevie is a nickname for the sweetener Stevia.
I’m not sure what they are measuring here though - if it’s only birth certificates then I’m sure Stevie is dominated by girls for a long time.
I feel like when I was a child more people were present with a PH, but nowadas virtually nobody. Most of the Stephens I know are "old", and I think "Steve" won.
But no doubt it varies on country, and who you know.
(I legally changed my name from Steven to Steve, a couple of years ago, because it was the only name I'd ever used and it got too tiresome dealing with my official passport, and ID saying one name when I signed/wrote another name on all my official paperwork. To the extent that employers would book flights in one name but my passport was in the other name, cue much hilarity at boarding time..)
Either way, peeking through the list, seems to me names which end with a vowel are usually feminine. However, there's a caveat: names end up shortened, and over time even those get shortened.
'Brit', 'Britney' for 'Brittany'.
'Gerry' or 'Geri' or 'Ger' for 'Gareth' (Dutch variant: 'Gerrit'),
'Pat', 'Patty' for 'Patrick', 'Patricia'.
'Pen', 'Penny' for 'Penelope'
'Ash' for 'Ashley'.
'Tash' or 'Tasha' for 'Natasha', 'Nata(s)cha' (a variant of Nathan/Nathaniel?)
'Toni', 'Tony', or 'Ton' for 'Antonia', 'Anton', or 'Antonius'.
Skimming through the quick examples I came up with, one thing stands out: if it ends with an 'a', feminine. I believe this stems from Latin? It also appears Brittany is a very British example, whereas say 'Tony' stems from a Catholic background. People with that background get very traditional names, but they're always practically shortened. Annoyingly, you'd have to mention your complete name on say a form, but otherwise you get a wider choice since you have like three names, and they're relatively long so more variety to pick from.
Their names were Kim, and Pinky. Kim was the wife and Pinky was the husband.
Also, as someone who saw quite some football (non-US version), I ofcourse am familiar with a lot of names. For example, Andrea Pirlo. We also learn some via history at school, since Italy plays a prominent role in Europe's history. Regarding Nicola, people might be familiar with Nikola Tesla (the 'c' in this case, sounds like 'k') and it is just a variant of 'Nico', 'Nicole', 'Nicolas'. Then there's some dude at FIFA, 'Gianni' which is a variant of 'Jean', 'Jan', 'Jeanne', 'Janet', 'Jannie', 'Janine', etc. I could go on about Gianluigi Buffon...
What I just remind myself with regards to Italian is it tends to add a vowel at end of a word or name, but it often doesn't sound same in English or my native tongue (Dutch).
Michele and Daniele look like misspellings of Michelle and Danielle though. I don't know any women named Daniele or men named Danielle.
Also, fun fact, I got invited to a ton Women in Tech stuff. I even got recruited to a company that was proud of having > 50% women in their teams. I assume that was because I was working on an OSS project (Chromium) and I had no avatar there.
What do you mean? The Italian male name Andrea and the English female name Andrea aren't unrelated names that happen to be spelled the same way. They are one and the same name, both derived from the Greek word for "man"; the Italian name has managed to remember that it's overtly masculine and the English name has forgotten this.
-elle is pretty clearly descended from one of the usual Latin diminutives (also visible in e.g. Spanish tortilla). -ette seems to come from a much rarer one?
There's a fun map on Spanish wikipedia of which diminutive forms are preferred in which parts of Spain: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo:Diminutivos_del_espa%C...
They are directly derived from the feminine Greek word "andreia", meaning "courage" or "virility", which had been derived from "andros", as supposedly a quality typical for males.
It is the Italian name which has forgotten that originally it was a feminine word, not the English, which has preserved the original grammatical gender.
In Indo-European languages, most of the nouns denoting qualities have the feminine grammatical gender, so "andreia" is not an exception.
That's not really what I said. The name is a masculine name. You can name your son "virility" without problems. If you try to do that to your daughter, you're going to have problems. The grammatical gender of the word is a separate concern.
Andrea as a female name is similar to Carla or Caroline. Take a name that means something related to men (but no longer obviously so) and adjust it a bit to make it a female name. As a male name it just reflects changes in pronunciation over time.
I wouldn’t be surprise to meet a (female) Daniele. The second L is already dropped somewhat regularly in Michelle. Which is interesting because it came from the French, but since then the French spelling drifted to "Michèle" (and then more or less fell completely out of fashion, and then seemed to come back for a while). In any case, both are pronounced exactly the same way.
The closest English male names to your examples are Andre/Andrew, Simon, Nicholas/Nick, Michael/Mike, Daniel/Dan. Gianni is John, etc
Many other Italian words that end with the letter E are changed to I, or mispronounced.
Ends in vowel = female: probably mostly true, in that it may be >50%, but it's unreliable enough that I'd avoid trying to base any assumptions off it.
Names really follow no rules at all here. For both good and bad. E.g. most recently I ran across a "La-sia" pronounced "ladashsia". If it's spelled vat-ik'Nff and pronounced "King George" and they're female, then that's what's correct.
Or the names of biblical prophets like Ezra or Elisha. Not very popular today but you can find a lot of them in 19th century records.
E.g. Ezra was Esdras in Greek and in Hebrew it probably ended in "-ahu", while Elisha was Eliseus in Greek and in Hebrew it ended in ayin after the "-a-".
> It is part of the Italian male names ending in a, some others being Elia (Elias), Enea (Aeneas), Luca (Lucas), Mattia (Matthias), Nicola (Nicholas), Tobia (Tobias).
So the original grammatical gender was feminine, hence the -a termination.
Which places? I guess I ask because your next sentence:
> Many of the exceptions will be obviously foreign names with traditional spelling
Which makes me wonder if you meant "US places", because I can think of a few male names, which maybe categorised as "foreign" if you're in the US, that end in "a".
e.g. Csaba (pronounced "Chubba") is a reasonably common Hungarian name.
And some not so "foreign" ones, albeit mostly with Biblical roots, like Joshua and Ezra.
Yes, I was referring to places in the USA.
Ashley Williams is the name of two American actresses as well as two male soccer players (Welsh and Liberian) and a male boxer (also Welsh).
Maybe, I guess. That would be one of those "abbreviations" like "Peggy" ("abbreviating" Margaret) that doesn't actually abbreviate the name, and you just have to know that someone out there thinks it's related.
"Stevie" for "Steven" follows the ordinary rules of English. For "Stephanie", you'd expect "Steffie".
(Way underrated)
In Spanish and Portugese, -a is a feminine suffix and -o is masculine; that's where we get Patricio vs Patricia.
There are very few female names that end with -o and very few male names that end with -a in Spanish.
Another example is -ine in Joseph/Josephine. -ine/-ino/-in is a feminizing suffix in German and a diminutive in Spanish and French, that's why it's a femenine suffix in names. In English we have hero vs heroine.
[0]: https://dcc.dickinson.edu/grammar/latin/case-endings-five-de...
Andrea, Luca, Nicola are the most common.
Andreas Lucas Nicolas, etc. (perhaps with different spelling in Latin)
Yes, but also because those names were originally Greek.
Elizabeth
Eliza, Liz, Liza, Lisa, Beth, Betty
Tony in the US is often short for Anthony.
Chris, Kris, or Cris can be short for Christina, Kristina, Kristofer, Christopher, Kristian, Kristian, Christy, Krista, or Kristi. Sometimes you'll see Crys, Chris, Krys, Kris, or Cris for Crystal/Cristal/Chrystal/Krystal.
You'll also sometimes see Christopher shortened to Topher or to Kit.
Chris can be short for Christian.
These two are incredibly common in the UK. You will occasionally see Ant (as in And & Dec TV presenters) but almost no one uses Anthony, they are usually all Tonys.
The female short names is usually spelt Toni, but pronounced the same.
> "Well, I wish you every joy," Miles went on [...] He managed a wink. "Name the first one after me, eh?"
> [She] grinned. "I'm not sure she'd appreciate that. Milesanna? Milesia?"
> "Milesia sounds like a disease," Miles admitted, taken aback. "In that case, don't. I wouldn't want her to grow up hating me in absentia."
-- Memory (1996) by Lois McMaster Bujold
Interestingly, the first few books are about Miles' parents, but it's neat to see what the most popular character does/doesn't inherit.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorkosigan_Saga
It isn't!
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Miles
>> From Old French given name Milo, of problematic origin, possibly from an unknown Germanic element, or a short form of Slavic names beginning with mil- "grace, favor". The English form is associated by folk etymology with Latin mīles ("soldier").
It would be nice to know that the Old French name didn't secretly happen to match the hypothetical Old French form of the Latin word for soldier. I sadly don't personally know how to check what form miles, militis would have taken in Old French.
A good heuristic, though, is that if the French name had come from this very common Latin word, someone would have already thought of that (as has in fact happened many times) and it would have been thoroughly investigated. The evidence in support must be somewhere between "wafer-thin" and "robustly contradicted by the known sound changes from Latin to French".
Maybe it needs the birthday
edit: No, it's stuck in the 80s: "The data comes from a 5% sampling of Social Security card applications with dates of birth from January 1980 through December 1989"
https://metacpan.org/pod/Text::GenderFromName#REGARDING-THE-...
> It is a good idea to apply for your child's Social Security number and birth certificate at birth. If you apply at the hospital, the state agency that issues birth certificates will share your child's information with us. Then, we will mail the Social Security card to you. If you wait to apply, there may be delays while we verify your child's birth certificate.
Before that, usually you got one when you needed one, when you started working.
In the past there were no hard associations between sexes and gender and it was possible to find boys wearing some pink clothing, but it was never the case that people associated pink with boys and blue with girls.
There are some limited examples that contribute to the misunderstanding. For example blue is often associated with the Virgin Mary and red (not pink) was considered a manly color often worn by warriors (e.g. the British, the Romans, etc).
Anecdotally, the boy->girl names are almost all very popular names where I've met multiple each of those across different ages, whereas the other two categories feel like they have a lot more down-list entries.
Though I'm not 100% sure they weren't using their family name as their everyday identity name (the Kims I met were not related).
Very likely it's their family name. Kim is the most common family name in Korea. Most Korean given names are two characters (=2 syllables) and more difficult to pronounce and memorize for westerners. And because of the space inserted between two romanized syllables (Jong Un), they are often misunderstood as middle + given names.
What I didn't know until just now is Kim was just a nickname. He was Harold Adrian Russell Philby and apparently Nicknamed "Kim" after the boy-spy in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim[2] which surely foreshadowed his career!!
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24803131
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Philby
Something like https://colorbrewer2.org/#type=diverging&scheme=PiYG&n=11 would probably have been suitable here (listed among the colorblind-safe options for diverging schemes).
I'd wager if it weren't for Clinton, most people would still associate it with men.
Back in school it wasn't a problem, people knew "Loren" was male, "Lauren" was female. Now, an awful lot of people don't. It's an uncommon enough name that even if you were around back when that's how it worked you very well might not have known it.
As an adult I routinely get misgendered, but it's a so-what to me.
*solely because her legal, married name is Lauren Bush Lauren. She actually changed it, which is gold (and honestly very sweet).
You're fortunate that the spelling is distinct. The story of Kim O'Grady is depressing.
https://www.thecut.com/2013/07/maybe-you-should-add-mister-t...
True Story: My mom was a 2nd grade teacher for 30 years and in the 70s had a student with very 'hippie" style parents. They named their son Log Cabin. You can imagine how that went over in elementary school.
> And he said, "Son, this world is rough
> And if a man's gonna make it, he's gotta be tough
> And I knew I wouldn't be there to help ya along.
> So I give ya that name and I said goodbye
> I knew you'd have to get tough or die
> And it's the name that helped to make you strong."
Johnny Cash - A Boy Named Sue
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Boy_Named_Sue
It may also have been more popular in the UK than the US.
I've wondered if the women that have carried the name have liked it? In my mind, it's always sounded very blunt so as to be feminine, but I recognize I'm heavily biased when it comes to my own name.
e.g. “Pat” is cited, but doesn’t specify whether that refers to Patricia or Patrick.
Super informative article.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was related to the character[0] portrayed by Beth Riesgraf[2] on Leverage[1]
[0] https://leverage.fandom.com/wiki/Parker
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leverage_(American_TV_series)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beth_Riesgraf