The rise in popularity of boys' names that end in ‘n’ | Hacker News Reader

The rise in popularity of boys' names that end in ‘n’

io9.com

50 pointssp33261 comments

Of the seven boys I know under the age of 3, six have names ending in N: Mason, Lawson, Hudson, Colin, Callen and Quinn. And while the last one doesn't quote match the pattern as the others, that's a pretty stunning percentage.

Can't think of any under three in Australia that match that. The trend of the last few years has been following that cycle of rich/poor/rich/poor. e.g., names that were once royal/grand, then common and poor, now cool again like George, Alfred (Alfie), William (Billy), Edward (Eddy), etc.

Try around Elizabeth. At the very least you'll find the practice of spelling a name any way you want to be more common.

You're correct about the English name revival with Oliver going from 50th to 1st in the last decade.

That is fascinating. Please don't take this the wrong way because I'm genuinely curious, but are they all white kids? I'm curious to see if this is a way for some white parents to give their children distinctively white names.

The original article points out that Jayden was especially popular among minorities in New York, so I doubt that this particular trend is particularly closely tied to race.

Yeah I was actually wondering the opposite, whether 'n' is getting more popular because it's literally more friendly to more minorities. E.g. East Asian immigrants who want to give their child a western name might look for one they can pronounce easiest -- the 'n' ending is certainly easier for some of these languages. Obviously the vast majority of these kids aren't children of immigrants but it could be a positive feedback loop that plays in n's favor.

Yep, all but one are white.

Adding more anecdata...my daughter's public school class has names I can't even pronounce - not a single Jennifer, Jessica, Shawn, or Mike ala the names that were popular in my generation. The population of the school is about 40% latino/a, but those kids generally seem to have "traditional" names - Jorge, Jose, etc. It's the white kids that have the funky new age names, both boys and girls. I'd say socio-economic conditions are about the same for all ethnic groups - we live in a poor, rural community. Not sure what can be extrapolated from any of that.

I named my son Quinn - it's a celtic name, even though neither my wife or myself can claim any such ancestry. And no, we didn't really give whether a name sounded like a particular ethnicity even the slightest thought when we named any of our kids.

We generated large lists of names and would read them off to each other. Both of us just liked the sound of Quinn - felt modern yet traditional, masculine, and so we though, unique. Unfortunately it has become the "Sean / Shawn" of this generation - gender neutral and all too common. I feel a bit like Johnny Cash and the "Boy Named Sue" where I hope he doesn't hate me as he gets older. Honestly though, in our small town there's only one other Quinn (a little girl about his same age) and everybody in town knows him because of his unique name and even more special personality. So, guess it's alright in the end.

I see. I certainly wouldn't think most parents would make conscious decision to pick more 'white' sounding name. I'm more curious about the catalyst that makes certain names take-off in popularity, and hence making them sound more attractive to parents. In your case, I wonder what caused you and your wife to feel that Quinn sounded 'modern yet traditional'.

Quinn as boy's name is uncommon, but its popularity got a nice boost in 1985 and has been on a nice uptrend.

www.babycenter.com/baby-names-quinn-462915.htm

Quinn as girl's name is a different story.

www.babycenter.com/baby-names-quinn-6865.htm

It surged in popularity some time in 2009.

We're not caucasian and our son's name ends in N. My sister, who just recently had a son also gave him a name that ends in N.

I see. I wasn't implying that any name that ends in "N" sounds caucasian. But when I looked at the 6 names (Mason, Lawson, Hudson, Colin, Callen and Quinn), they all sounded like names that white people are more likely to use. (again, this could be my hyper sensitive radar towards race issues, so I hope no one takes offense to it. I was just very curious to see if there was a parallel trend going on to black parents giving their children distinctively black names.

pcurve - responding to your question about why we "felt" that way about the name. So interestingly enough, months after he was born I recalled that my grandparents had good friends with the last name of "Quinn." I had probably only met them once or twice when I was very young, but I have to wonder if it was some kind of subliminal thing in my case. Other people have brought up the movie / song "The Mighty Quinn" - perhaps in the case of some of these trends there is just enough subtle social hints to keep certain names alive. The 2009 increase in Quinn as a female name I'm certain had to do with the TV show "Glee."Much like one of the other commenters in this thread, I felt very odd that the name we'd picked for our son, thinking it was somewhat unique or uncommon, suddenly became part of a social trend.

ah that makes sense. Thanks for the story and explanation.

This strikes me as the same sort of statistical non-information that people strive to come up with during sports games (at least in the US). "Mr. X is the first person in 17 years to bat Y% during years modulo Z while facing right-handed pitchers with only four fingers on their left hands!"

Why is that? It's not just some sampling error, it's the entire social security database, and there is a definite trend over time.

Note this graph measures the % of total names, not the % of total boys with names ending with 'n' (which would be much more meaningful).

It says "distribution of last letter in newborn boys' names".

If you want insanity, try to name any female russian first name that does not end with a 'uh' or 'ah' sound.

Lubov.

does sanity dance

Нинель

Woot, Lenin backwards

"sonseh" is another one

I think that's because nouns ending in a "ah" are considered feminine in the Russian language

http://www.russianlessons.net/grammar/nouns_gender.php

Yeah, for the name to be feminine it must end in ah/ya sound or a certain class of soft consonant endings, so this pretty much restricts the usual female names to this class. That said you're quite likely to encounter people with non-Slavic names, like Gulimzhan which don't have to follow this rule.

Certainly seems to checkout. It's an interesting trend, kind of similar to how the majority of girls' name ends in a vowel (including 'y').

Relevant Data: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/top5names.html

Father of an Ethan here. Before we named him (12 years ago) it was a relatively uncommon name, and then suddenly it was the #1 boys name. Kind of creepy, to be plugged into the cultural pulse and not be aware of it.

One thing that drew me to the name was that there was no obvious "cute" nickname form of it. Unlike my other favorite name, Lawrence, which gets turned into the distasteful (to me) Larry.

Mission Impossible?

That's my best guess. That and/or moms with their secret crushes on Ethan Hawke.

Going off a parallel to Nathan -> Nate, I'm going to suggest he be called "Ete" ;)

Hello new mods, just wondering why this story is only 2 hours old, has 43 votes but has already fallen to the third page, whereas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7560756 has the same number of votes, is 11 hours old, and is ranked slightly higher? Thanks.

My two sons are named Carlo Gibson Septimius and Leo Balthazar Septimius. So is that one out of four?

Besides that the boys we know on their age is a Marius, Leon, Loui, Anthon, Emil, Emil, Ethan, Austin.

All the boys that end with n have english speaking parents (besides my oldest who is Gibson as a middle name)

If this is true, I applaud you - those are fantastic names.

Emil was somewhere on our list as well.

It's true :) What you see is a struggle between my wife and me.

I wanted Gibson and Balthazar to be first names, my wife wanted Carlo and Leo. She won first round I will win the next one :)

Emil is my nephew and a great name.

Is the graph measuring the number of distinct names that end with 'n', or the number of recently born boys who have names that begin with 'n'?

If it's the former, then unpopular names with many distinct spellings may be vastly overrepresented in the graph.

Wolfram Alpha has name data, although I couldn't get it to return this sort of statistic.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10+most+popular+boys+na...

http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/limits.html

It's funny I was just joking on twitter that, as a rule, every t-ball team in my son's league has to have a Jaden and an Aiden on it.

My son's name also ends in n (Boston) but I've yet to encounter it amongst other kids

Well, there's a Kishan on my block and a Nathan around the corner, both under three. But John and its variants--Ian, Ivan--have never really gone away, have they?

I would like to see socioeconomic status factored into the name trends.

Maybe n is a popular letter to end nouns with the same way g is a popular way to end verbs with? (ing)

The only regular noun inflections append an 's', not an 'n'. Certain people's wishes aside, the ox -> oxen / shoe -> shoon / cow -> kine pattern is dead, and left very little in the way of irregular relics.

My half-baked theory is names ending with "n" are generally all clearly masculine. Many names are being gradually feminized, or at least androgenized, such as Taylor and Kacey. I bet many parents naming boys would try to avoid ambiguous or potentially ambiguous names.

All of the boy names that pop into my head right now that end with "n" are pretty unassailably male.

John. Shawn. Allen. Ben. Brandon. Trenton. Colin. Ethan. Jason.

Of course, the day is coming that some little girl is named Johnathan.

Roslyn?

I'm not sure if names that end in 'n' "sound" more masculine, or it's just that there aren't that many female names that end in 'n'. But you might have a point. Most popular female names end in 'a' 'e' or 'y'.

http://www.babycenter.com/popularBabyNames.htm?year=2014

But those female names that do end in 'n', I don't think they sound masculine. (lauren, Kathleen, Evelyn, Lillian, Allison, Carolyn) etc.

Coming up with a measure of how masculine or feminine a name is would be a great application for machine learning.

The two features I can see that makes names more feminine are a larger number of vowels, and ending in a vowel. Maybe consonants are more masculine?

that would be very interesting, especially if you can factor in non-alphabet based names, such as ones from Asia, and find that there is a universal pattern.

Popular Japanese names: http://japanese.about.com/library/weekly/aa050601a.htm

Your chinese names link is inexplicably ranking entire names (look at #s 5, 6, and 8, the girl's name is 秀英 xiuying in every case; 王, 李, and 张 just happen to all be incredibly common family names. 丽 li also occurs in the list with each of those, although it does seem to be much less common for girls with the surname 李 [also pronounced li]. Or notice how the top four male names are all 伟.). But I'm pretty sure no one is interested in which names occur how often with which surnames -- would you be interested in studying the breakdown of "Lisa" among people variously surnamed Black, Smith, Jones, etc?

The chinese names link does accurately indicate that a chinese girl's name is usually distinguishable by the meaning; things like "beautiful", "graceful", "quiet", "compliant", and so on are popular. I would guess phonetic considerations are a distant second (though, as illustrated by the anomalous unpopularity of 李丽, they clearly do come into it).

Thanks for the clarification.

Reading through the list of just first names, the only phonetic pattern that sticks out is that there aren't any female names that start with K. But otherwise I would agree, I doubt most non-Chinese would be able to differentiate Chinese names by gender.

www.ourbabynames.co.uk/chineseboys.php www.ourbabynames.co.uk/chinesegirls.php

Trenton?

Don't tell me that's a girl's name now too

Counter to your point, Vivian used to be a common mans name but underwent a feminisation so that now it's almost exclusively used by women

Certainly, there are female names that end with "n"! My thought is more along the lines of, perhaps "of all currently male names ending with n, more are strongly masculine (than other letters)"

To me, Leslie seems another good example.

Beverly was the one that shocked me. It's partly since I grew up with an Aunt Beverly, and partly because I'm used to names ending in -ly being feminine.

Ann, Caitlyn, Eileen, Kathleen, Kathryn, Maureen do come to mind. I guess Morgan can go either way, but the two I know are female.

One interesting fact I learned is that all words beginning with "sn" have to do with your upper mouth or nose. E.g. snarl, sneeze, snot, snog, snort, sniff.

Snip, snag, snow....

Snatch, snitch, snake...

OK, he phrased this incredibly poorly, but he's referring to an acknowledged linguistic phenomenon.