
Baby Name Predictor - jsvine
http://time.com/93911/baby-name-predictor/
======
simonsarris
Wow, my dad would have loved to come across a tool like this.

My father, in his infinite genius, devised a clever naming scheme for his
children (three of us), with the following rules:

1\. The _middle_ name must be a fairly rare name, so that we might be the only
one among friends/peers with the name, but not so unique or strange that we'd
be ridiculed.

I'm really grateful for this, and I consider the uniqueness (yet normalcy) of
my name a huge gift. To this day I've only ever met one other Simon in person.
(It's extremely rare in the US, but very popular in the UK I'm told).

2\. The _first_ name must be fairly common, everyday name, named after someone
in the family, as a fallback for us.

Then, we were all to be called by our middle names. If we grew up detesting
that name[1], we could easily switch to our _first_ name as our primary _je m
'apelle_ and nobody in our future would think twice about it.

John Nicholas was picked for my brother's first and middle as Nicholas was a
"good Greek name" that almost nobody in America used. That was 1987. If you
look at Nicholas in this tool you'll see just what happened to that name! (in
the 1980's it shot up to over 1% of names and remained that way until after
2000).

My dad was kind of bummed, and probably would have picked a different name if
he had a bit of accessible clairvoyance. (Remember, pre-internet it was hard
to even know that you could find this information out at all. I suspect the
data he found in the 1980's, if any, was already years out of date)

I'm the only child that didn't follow the rubric because Anthony Simon Sarris
makes for a slightly offensive monogram, so my parents switched the order (to
Simon Anthony Sarris) and I'm the only child called by his first name.

[1] My little brother hated his middle name Morgan for most of his life (a
girl's name too, some teasing, etc) so most of his friends call him by his
first name. After high-school he appreciates both names.

Aside- I do think our kind are more predisposed to obsess over names than
most:

    
    
      "There are only two hard problems in Computer Science:
       cache invalidation and naming things."
    
       -- Phil Karlton

~~~
Theodores
I was almost a 'Simon', however my mum spared me that name. However, it really
is a popular name in the UK and has been perennially so. There is the
potential for school-ground teasing - 'Simon says...' and 'simple Simon...'
are two potential problem areas.

As for Nicholas, not sure about kids today in the UK but there were plenty of
Nicholii when I was at school, again, it wasn't a 'fad' name.

I do find the called-by-second name 'rule' to be tantamount to having a stage
name. It is rare in the UK for people to have their 'given' name as their
middle name, I have only ever know one British person to do that. Maybe I
should get out more, however, that is including the vast hordes of
school/university friends/coursemates/party-goers.

Personally I am glad I wasn't named after someone who turned out to be
somewhat less than wholesome. Whatever happened to those born in the 1930's
and given the name 'Adolf'? I did check but 'Adolf' has been erased from
Time's databanks.

~~~
ghaff
Interestingly, Adolph was already on a pretty sharp decline before the 1930s
(and Adolf, with that spelling, was always very rare--which is interesting and
which I never realized).
[http://www.babynamewizard.com/](http://www.babynamewizard.com/)

~~~
ovulator
I beleive nearly all records you’ll find of baby names online are based on
United States data. As such, the decline of Adolph before the 1930’s could
probably be attributited to the negative German propoganda leading up to WWI.

~~~
ghaff
Good point. I was thinking of the obvious correlation but it would be
reasonable to expect a drop-off of obviously Germanic names starting around
the time of WWI. You do see a drop-off prior to that (which may well be
related to US immigration patterns) but then a leveling off. That's followed
though by a sharp dropoff around 1914 which you'd probably expect.

------
jpatokal
Geeky naming baby naming story time! My wife's Japanese, and I'm Finnish. To
name our kids, I found databases of Finnish and Japanese names, cross-
referenced them together (with fuzzy matching to account for spelling
variance, so eg. l == r and Finnish j == Japanese y), and filtered out those
that were opposite genders. In the end, there were precisely three male names
left... and we used two!

Crappy code on Github:
[https://github.com/jpatokal/baby_names](https://github.com/jpatokal/baby_names)

I was originally going to make this a public website, but encoding all the
sound-vs-spelling rules is a pain and doing N-to-N fuzzy matching with raw SQL
is too slow.

~~~
lovemenot
Used a similar method to this. For a boy, we opted for Kai , which I believe
works for some Nordic countries' names (and Scotland) as well as in Japanese
(umi).

------
akavi
One lovely benefit of being an ethnic minority living outside the "motherland"
is that you get a large pool of names to choose from that satisfy both the
"only one in their 2nd grade class" and "venerable and meaningful" criteria.

The downside is you'll be spelling out your name at Starbucks for the rest of
your life and probably grow very tired of saying "No, emphasis on the first
syllable, not the last" twice a week. But there are tradeoffs to everything.

~~~
tcheard
I never understood this.

Starbucks (or other places like it) don't ask for ID to prove the name you
give them is actually yours. So why, if it is such a pain using your real
name, don't you come up with a name, that is easy for them, that you can use
just for when you are at establishments like this?

You are never going to be able to fix the problem on their end, so why don't
you do something about it?

~~~
poulsbohemian
If you build a better mousetrap, the world will build a better mouse.

What I mean is, my family name is "Strickler." It's easy - pronounced exactly
as it is spelled. Yet I get called "strick," "sticker," "strickland,"
"striker," "stickler," etc. My wife didn't take my name when we got married,
with one of the major reasons being "nobody can pronounce your name right."
Yes, I've slightly switch topics here to family names over first names, but
the issue is the same - doesn't matter if it's pronounced exactly as spelled,
doesn't matter if it is a common name or uses standard characters - the
problem is that _people don 't read or pay attention._ You could be "Smith" or
"Johnson" and somebody would screw it up, so you (or your parents) might as
well pick something you like.

~~~
silencio
My name is easy beyond belief but people get it wrong ALL THE TIME. You'd
think "Jane" is pretty safe, but especially at Starbucks it gets rewritten
into a lot of other names like "Shane" or "Jayne" or "Jain". My now maiden
name "Lee" is...well...."Li", "Le", "Leigh"..........I think one person almost
got my new last name wrong but it was over the phone and a B vs V problem.

Even better is when I was at Disney World for part of my honeymoon. If you
tell Disney employees you're celebrating an occasion, they'll give you a
button for it - e.g. honeymoon, 1st visit, family reunion. One employee
offered to customize my husband's and my very boring honeymoon buttons for us
with our names. She asked my husband if he spelled his name (Kevin) "the way
you expect to spell it". I got a button that said "with Keven" and didn't have
the heart to tell her what was wrong with it.

BTW at my restaurant I used to use names and now I just use numbers. Numbers
are way easier to remember and call out, and makes it harder for people to
accidentally (or purposefully) take the wrong thing if they can't return the
number card back.

~~~
p8952
>She asked my husband if he spelled his name (Kevin) "the way you expect to
spell it". I got a button that said "with Keven" and didn't have the heart to
tell her what was wrong with it.

Poor girl. As someone cursed with the inability to spell non-phonetically I'd
hate to have to ever write anything without the help of spell check.

It's such a silly thing when you think about it but people will write you off
as a moron without a second thought.

------
chrisfarms
> Adolph last peaked in 1913 . It will next peak as a baby name in 2029.

Well it's bound to come back someday I guess, 2029 is as good a time as any :)

~~~
ccernaf
I'm surprised at Winston and Franklin - I'm pretty confident that the
bump/spike was due to Churchill and Roosevelt. Barack unfortunately was not in
the list, so we can't compare that. But compare that to Joseph (Stalin), also
a common name, which didn't experience a dip. But then again, neither did
Adolph.

Is there a name that experienced a dip, and then became popular again, due to
a significant person?

~~~
deckiedan
I would guess that Joseph wouldn't dip due to the huge number of other famous
Josephs. (St. Joseph being the most famous).
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_%28name%29#People_known_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_%28name%29#People_known_as_Joseph)

Compared to Winston
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_%28name%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_%28name%29))
which is only common in British/American history.

------
gammarator
Impressive: Time put the source code for the project on github:
[https://github.com/TimeMagazine/babynames](https://github.com/TimeMagazine/babynames)

Not a fully replicable analysis, but still very cool to see.

------
alister
> _parents jump on the bandwagon, only to peak and decline as everyone on the
> playground starts answering to the same name_

Is the USA more individualistic when choosing names than, say, China or
Brazil?

Brazilians regularly give their date of birth in mundane situations because
first+last name is not nearly unique enough:

[http://brazilsense.com/index.php?title=Giving_birth_date](http://brazilsense.com/index.php?title=Giving_birth_date)

It's a shame the chart is US names only. I'd like to see common names ranked
by country, to see if it says something about a culture's desire for either
homogeneity or individuality.

It would be interesting to see changes in conformity over time as well. In the
USA, Sophia and Noah peaked at 1% each -- which seems like parents slavishly
follow fashion -- but John was actually 9% back in 1880! Maybe conformity was
more important a hundred years ago, and the USA has actually become more
individualistic.

~~~
kijin
Another possibility is that there is greater diversity in the US now than a
hundred years ago, people are more aware of it, and are okay with it, so
there's a much larger pool of names to choose from.

A hundred years ago, it would have been unthinkable for a white, English-
speaking family to give their children a name that sounded even remotely non-
Anglo-Saxon. Nowadays, nobody looks at you funny if you're named Mila or
Declan.

~~~
adventured
Seems pretty likely. John (M) for example was perhaps at 9% circa 1870. That's
pretty dramatic, and definitely speaks to the lower cultural diversity.

------
adrr
Interesting. Wonder if you could use this data to determine most probably age
range of a person.

~~~
Dave_Rosenthal
Search for a name in wolfram alpha and it give you the age PDF

------
notduncansmith
Nice to know that we picked what will be a fairly uncommon, but not unheard-
of, name for some time.

I named my son Emmet (inspired by the Sublime plugin, stuck with it because my
fiancé liked it). His full name is Emmet Smith, and the only two burdens it
looks like we stuck him with were 1) the name of a famous football player
(he's apparently not bad, and won Dancing With The Stars, so we don't feel too
guilty), and 2) easily misspelt. We didn't know about #1 until after he was
born (probably should have Googled it first), and I didn't really consider #2
until just now.

We were mostly concerned with the ability to make fun of the name (Emmet
doesn't lend itself to any crude nicknames we could think of), that it sounded
nice, and that it would be fairly unlikely to encounter another one in school.
I met another Duncan once in high school; we had a short chat after class, and
he went by his middle name (Robert) the rest of the year.

If we have another child, we'll have to pick a name that synergizes well with
Emmet (though hopefully that won't be for some time)!

------
shanecleveland
I used the historical SSA data to build babynamely.com. pretty basic, but good
at alternate spellings and trends. I'd love to add a unique/interesting metric
or predictor. The data is all there!

I update it each year. I have three kids. The most important criteria for us
was to not be too trendy or pick a name that was astronomically popular at the
time.

------
jscheel
My 18-month-old daughter's name is Evelyn (though we often call her Evie for
short). Her name comes from two totally different places. First, she is named
after my grandmother who passed away shortly before she was born. I wonder if
this is part of the reason the older names are popular again. Secondly, she is
named after Evie from The Mummy, which is one my wife's favorite movies (the
1999 version). Also a reason certain names become popular. Her middle name,
Grace, comes from the fact that it was only by the grace of God that we were
able to have her. We were really blessed with me getting some amazing
freelance work when we were trying to figure out how to finance our IVF. I'm
guessing that's a pretty common reason for Grace though. Well, anyways, we've
done our part to influence the standing of Evelyn in the names race.

~~~
cschmidt
Our daughter is Evelyn/Evie as well. She's 7, and we were ahead of the upward
swing. (I was a big Social Security baby name geek). Our pediatrician said,
"what an unusual name, there isn't another in our practice." Now there will be
many to follow.

I guess names just sound like their time has come, and everyone things so at
the same time.

~~~
ovulator
I think there are two main factors to why we see the popularity of certain
names surge.

One is what society finds important in a name. Right now in America that is
representing uniqueness in the individual, which is why parents get dismayed
when they see that they named children like many others, it makes their choice
feel much less unique, and by extension, their child.

The second part is that is has to sound like a name, if we wanted truly unique
names you could name your kid “Ubizalan” and probably nail uniquness, but fail
pretty miserably in sounding like a name. This is why we get phenomenon like:
Aiden, Brayden, Jayden, Caiden … all very popular names and because of their
spelling are “unique” but sound very similar, and therefore like a “name”.

I think it is this second phenomenon that results in peaks for certain names.
My daughters name is Scarlett, named after one of the colors of the University
where my wife and I met. But had it not “sounded” like a legitimate name we
wouldn’t have picked it. We certainly didn’t consider the rise of the
popularity of the actress Scarlett Johansen, but having subconsiously heard
her name in the media, it could have cemented the name as a “legitimate name”
and made us more likely to pick it than a name which has faded into more
obscure use.

~~~
gknoy
Most of us have also had Scarlett O'Hara as a literary figure for longer than
our lives, and so the name will seem "valid" for our parents, and any peers.
So, you are more likely to get a "Oh, neat, I haven't met anyone named that"
than a "What the heck!?" response.

------
jere
I've wondered for a while if there is a market for baby naming as a service.
If so, that would be a useful tool.

~~~
facepalm
I think in China it is a business, picking a name is very complicated because
of all the superstition there.

------
elwell
Here's a completely unrelated Chinese Restaurant Name Generator I made:
[http://www.christopherelwell.com/chinese-restuarant-name-
gen...](http://www.christopherelwell.com/chinese-restuarant-name-generator/)

------
Killswitch
I find my name peaked the year I was born and has declined every year since
very interesting.

------
calgaryeng123
I actually just created a baby name tracking/recommendation app for myself,
and released it for free to see anyone else was interested. You can find it at
www.BabyNameFaceoff.com.

The recommendation engine is David Celis' `recommendable`.

------
gknoy
I find it odd that my mother in law's name is not on this list. I wonder where
the tool draws its data: is it only data that is above a certain threshold of
the population?

------
clutterjoe
The name "Dick" last leaked in 1938, it will make a comeback in 2031 when
parents decide en masse to saddle their poor kids with lifelong ridicule.

------
Centigonal
The Github project doesn't appear to include the predictor code. I'm really
interested in what they used to make the predictions? Any leads?

------
personZ
An interesting and entertaining study. I question the rigour of the prediction
claims (they give a single example, though note that they disclaim that it
isn't to be taken too seriously), especially given that naming patterns are
dramatically changing.

The top girl name accounts for about 1% of the gender now, where early in the
1900s it would account for 6%+.

You can thank social media for that, and the effect is accelerating. Our
awareness of trends nation and worldwide is much more amplified than it was
before, and the forces that virally spread something also contribute to
suppressing it lest we all look like fools. Add that multiculturalism and the
acceptance of the same has greatly aided the entropy of names.

I find geographic distribution and name variations far more interesting
(though again, this is changing via social media).

e.g.

[http://names.yafla.com/#n=Isabelle,Isabel,Isabell,Isabella&s...](http://names.yafla.com/#n=Isabelle,Isabel,Isabell,Isabella&s=ft)

~~~
gknoy
That visualization of geographic name popularity is AWESOME. :)

------
Chinese_girl
The article is amazing.

