Ranking the most gender-neutral baby names in the US | Hacker News Reader

Ranking the most gender-neutral baby names in the US

nameplay.org

2 pointsaaronjbecker7 comments

I suppose Ashley was not included here because it's a US-specific data set, but among English-speaking countries, I suspect it must be one of the top gender-neutral names: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_(given_name)

the data is not only US specific but also focuses on recent naming trends, with the first chart covering 2000-2024. In the US, Ashley has been overwhelmingly female since the late 1960s: https://nameplay.org/names/combined/popularity/Ashley#gender...

The rankings on these lists do not square well with my life experience up to this point. The ones I thought would be at the top were non-existent or deep into the article in a specific table. The ones near the top of all the lists, I’ve never seen used in real life.

I have a follow-up post that covers "common" unisex names, which I arbitrarily defined as names with at least 25k births for both sexes. This one does have more of the names you were probably expecting to see: https://nameplay.org/blog/common-unisex-names-by-gender-rati...

The ranking for the linked post is based on a diversity index, which scores most highly for names closest to an exact 50-50 split. Hence framing it as the "most non-binary" of the unisex names. Admittedly this is more a statistical curiosity than a reflection of everyday life.

Thanks, this makes sense. I was starting to think I was even more of a hermit than I thought.

As both Ryley and Reilly are present, with Rian but no Ryan ...

Did you consider delving into the swampy waters of homophone names (and the tangential cesspool of alternative spelling and pronounciations) ?

Fortuneately the pool of babies named including unicode emoji's is still low in number.

I have been working on an algorithm to combine names with pronunciations that overlap, based on ARPAbet phoneme representations from CMU dict + generated by LLMs. The data is still messy, because "creative" spellings are hard for LLMs to deal with: token overlap with primary names is frequently low, and spelling variations only exist because English has such a lax approach to phonics to begin with.

Here's Ryan with its spelling variations: https://nameplay.org/names/combined/popularity/Ryan

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