Baby Name Predictor | Hacker News Reader

Baby Name Predictor

time.com

127 pointsjsvine73 comments

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 I suspect the data he found in the 1980's, if any, was already years out of date)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

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.

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/

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.

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.

As Louis CK artfully explains here, it doesn't matter what you name your kid, other kids will find ways to make fun of it:

http://youtu.be/WNSf-KQORRk?t=1m17s

> named after someone who turned out to be somewhat less than wholesome

South Korea here. Lots of Koreans (both South and North) are named Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, or Kim Jong Un. The fact that 20% of Koreans have the surname Kim exacerbates the problem.

Of course, Il Sung and Jong Il went into a sharp decline in South Korea as soon as people found out that they were seriously inauspicious names. But nobody had time to prepare for Jong Un's rise to power. Moreover, Jong Un is a relatively common name for girls ;)

The beauty of names is that you can pretty much do what you wish.

I go by a name that has nothing at all to do with my given name, and I don't ever recall ever being called by my given name. (Fortunately, it shares a letter, making signatures easier.) I'm the third generation doing that with my particular combination of names.

It was explained to me that this was relatively common in Ireland in the 19th century when official records were subject to forced anglicization. Whatever the case, it never causes any problems at all. Once in awhile a hard-ass security guard will give me some grief, but I'm high enough up the chain now that it doesn't happen much.

Off-topic, I've often heard the quote:

  "There are only two hard problems in Computer Science:
  cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors."

In the UK Simon used to be very popular (getting into the top 10 boys names in the early 70s). I'm from New Zealand and it was a very common name when I was growing up, it would be common to have at least one other "Simon" in my classes.

It is a much less common name these day however.

http://www.babynames.co.uk/popular-baby-names#name0=Simon

Just pick random European or other foreign names if you want something unique.

Make sure it's not a profanity in English and you should be fine.

I'm in the lucky position to have a considerably unique name naturally.

A goggle search of my name would turn up me and another 2 people max.

Do not try this in Germany. There is the term kevinism or chantalism [1]. If you name your child in such a way, it is most likely to decrease his or her chances in life. I guess, most middle class parents in America will not name their "Heaven" or something like that, but in Germany it is even stricter.

Germans seem to pay close attention to names and assign you to a social class, based on it. For example, if you get a phd, become a professor or member of a parliament, you are allowed to put a special token in front of your name (Dr., Prof., MdB, MdL), even in official documents like your driving license.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2012/02/01/does-...

I share a first name with my father, so to save confusion, they called me by my middle name. If it were strictly a matter of social convenience, that would be fine. But you can't do anything in the modern world without submitting some kind of form, and the form is what gives me trouble. I can put my first initial in the First Name field, but then some people think that means I want to be called R.

Some people, confronted with a single letter in the First Name field, might look at the Middle Name field, but often the Middle Name field is actually a Middle Initial field. So now they have no idea what to call me, and usually default back to R.

I could take the daring step of "lying," and putting my middle name in the First Name field, and my first initial in the Middle Initial field, but if they ever try to compare that record to, say, my drivers license or passport, there will be a mismatch, and some uncomfortable questions being asked. This is especially troublesome if the form is something that is likely to be coordinated with other forms in different offices.

Ironically, the first time I ever got any pushback for being an Initial-Name-Name instead of a Name-Initial-Name was when the HR department at Burroughs was processing my new-hire paperwork. Burroughs was chaired, at the time, by one W. Michael Blumenthal.

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

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.

Where did you get the databases of names? I'd like to do something similar but for different countries.

Edit: Nevermind, I see it is in the README under data.

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).

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.

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?

The procedure of always responding to "your name?" with "Arjun, A-R-J-U-N", then listening for anything that starts with an "ar" sound is just simpler than remembering to give a fake name and then remembering to listen for that fake name. For me, at least.

Shrug, it's hardly the largest burden to bear.

Go by RJ

No, that's my Starbucks secret, he can't have it!

My name, though not difficult, was seemingly mispronounced or spelled at every lunch and coffee establishment I frequented a few years back. So I took to providing a less-common name beginning with different letters of the alphabet, in order (e.g., Arnie on Monday, Bernard on Tuesday, etc.). It was always fun when someone would be shouting a name from the counter that I'd forgotten was mine for the day.

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.

I had an uncommon last name, but changed it to Johnson when I got married. I have yet to have someone mispronounce or misspell it, and I still appreciate that just a little bit every time I give my name over the phone.

But we gave our children very uncommon first names so their whole names would be unique.

This is true. My last name is Thomas but people will sometimes refer to me as Thompson, Thomason, etc. I get a lot of people asking how it's spelled,too (even native English speakers).

Happens with first names, too. My wife's name is "Erin"-with-an-E, and she always gets asked "is that with an A or an E?" Really? How many girls are there named "Aaron"-with-an-A? Oddly, nobody ever seems to worry about the genuine multiple possible spellings of Erin/Eirinn/Eireann.

Nobody ever has problems with "Logan", though. I suspect it's just common enough that most people are familiar with the spelling and the pronunciation (thank-you X-Men), but sufficiently uncommon that almost nobody has ever encountered a weird alternate spelling that could cause confusion.

Gonna encourage one of the kids to name their firstborn L'eaughanne!

(Don't worry--they don't do any of the things I tell 'em to do, no matter much amusement it would give me.)

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.

>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.

My favorite are the typographical issues. My last name contains an I and I often hear L in its place from telemarketers. Makes hanging up on them even easier than it already is.

My name is an uncommon one: "Leland Batey". However, pretty much everyone pronounces it correctly.

I do this. For some reason the "f" sound in "Phil" is nearly impossible to convey over the phone. About 80% of the time my order comes out for Bill, but not 100% of the time, so it's a real pain. I just use "Mike" now. Nice, strong, simple name with no possibility for confusion.

I use Mike too right now. Before I settled on that I tried John but people ask how to spell that. My problem with Mike is that I have collisions sometimes.

Dave is my go-to. Nice and sharp sounding.

Totally - I usually give my nickname in those situations, it's easier for Anglos to handle

Solution: don't buy starbucks.

HA. My ethnic name can be abbreviated to 3 letters and still be pretty unique (namewise) for those Starbucks occasions.

> 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 :)

Realistically, how frequently to you hear the infamous 20th century leader referred to as "Adolph Hitler" today, as opposed to just "Hitler" (or, "literally Hitler")? I think by 2029 the fact that his first name was "Adolph" will fall into the pile of "mostly obscure history facts".

Totally disagree. I call Hitler "Hitler", but whenever I hear the name "Adolf" I think of Hitler as well. That name is done in America.

Things can change in another generation. By 2029, American kids born after 9/11 will be having and naming kids of their own, so "Osama" might be the #1 name to avoid, with WW2 less significant in their perceptions.

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?

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_...

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

In Germany even obscure codes like "88" (H is the 8th character in the alphabet) are referred to Nazis.

This happended just a few days ago: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/09/ariel-detergent-naz...

There are special rules for license plates:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of_...

So i highly doubt, that a German non-nazi child will ever be named Adolf again.

Impressive: Time put the source code for the project on github: https://github.com/TimeMagazine/babynames

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

> 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

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.

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.

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.

Common names in Germany (in German): http://www.beliebte-vornamen.de/jahrgang

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

You definitely could. It's a probability curve tempered by a mortality curve, basically.

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

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)!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I would have assumed that Scarlett O'Hara (i.e. Gone with the Wind) would have legitimized it, but I see it was very rare until recently.

> 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.

Yeah, naming after grandparents is a major reason for name cycles. As the article says, names drop in popularity once they become popular, as people want relatively unique names for their children. So as the third generation grows up, their grandparents' once-popular names are now rarely used and seem unique again. Add the sentimental meaning on top of that, and you've got a name cycle inspired by grandparents.

There's lots of sources for more information about the psychology of child naming. My main source was Steven (look at the popularity cycle of that name family in the chart!) Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought."

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.

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

Check out http://nameberry.com/

I just released www.BabyNameFaceoff.com . Built it for myself, wondered if anyone else was interested.

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

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

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`.

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?

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.

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?

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...

That visualization of geographic name popularity is AWESOME. :)

The article is amazing.

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