How to Tell Someone’s Age When All You Know Is Her Name | Hacker News Reader

How to Tell Someone’s Age When All You Know Is Her Name

fivethirtyeight.com

421 pointsca98am79145 comments

Not only can you get a good idea of age from a name you can generate names that match age and sex. I have a niece who recently did a science fair project where she used Markov chains seeded with U.S. census data over the last hundred years to create new names. With about 90% accuracy people could tell if a fake name was from 100, 50, or <10 years ago and the sex.

An interesting side note was that she put in a simple profanity filter but in all of her trial runs it never picked up any "fuq" or variant names.

Edit: Here are sample boy names: Shill Flay Roshard Per Coll Milius Madfrego Derry Fer Fordy Carlel Marler Rommyronance Jord Felwooke Rott Luper Bent Zekin Othen Nolanterry Jerarton

Here are some girl names Esalessie Rine Nolenn Alynna Myrtinet Faybeciline Aline Orassabenda Phina Dorgia Lideleaste Beara Sonilinn Judelia Monangeora Jarnina Geleene Emozellyn Maudra Verta Lortis Fret Kathoph

Your niece is cool.

I think so. Here is a fun little story about a robotics project she worked on: http://davisclipper.com/view/full_story/21911572/article-Loc... (search for Platt in the article)

> At the Bountiful home, Alia Platt worked to design the arm that would throw the Frisbees.

I'll second njharman's comment. Your niece is cool! :)

Rommyronance sounds like a character out of Archie ;)

Orassabenda sounds like a girl who wants to kill her parents.

Possibly because they named her "Orassabenda"

My friend Felwooke Madfrego will be in touch with your niece regarding this apparent libel that his name is fake.

And here is that moment from life of brian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Zyv6YHR_UE

Any chance she could open source that? My friend's writing a fantasy novel and I think he could really use a realistic-sounding fake name or two.

http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/

I did specify "fantasy" for a reason. If you're writing fantasy you want your names to sound natural yet unlike anything your reader will seen before. Hence why I guess many names in fantasy novels (I'm thinking Song of Fire and Ice and Wheel of Time) are pretty much a normal name with one or two letters replaced.

I'll keep your link in mind though - for my own writing which is in a non-fantasy setting.

Googling turns up a few fantasy name generators that seem to work decently enough: https://www.google.com/search?q=fantasy+name+generator

fakenamegenerator.com does have "Hobbit" as a name set. Also the Norwegian name set does generate some interesting nordic names like Rosenvinge, Valgard, etc.

I was horrified when I realised that all the names in Game of Thrones are just normal names as pronounced by my one year old daughter.

I'll look into it.

You may also try to start with a set of real names and then apply some systematic sound changes to these, see http://www.zompist.com/sounds.htm

Ah, for the markov chains I'm assuming you mean by individual letter? Either way, cool project. How old was your niece at the time?

'Per' is a man's name, in Germany anyway.

In Scandinavia too - I believe it is more common there than in Germany. It comes from the Greek "Petros" - the same origin as Peter.

And 'Aline' is an actual woman's name, at least in France.

That's cool I actually wanted to do some thing similar ... a site that would guess your sex, age, and country of birth from the name you gave

I bet Rommyronance would get mercilessly bullied at school.

Did she ever generate lists per census? That would be interesting to see how the names changed.

One of the built-in models in the Wolfram Language does precisely this:

   In[1]:= Predict["NameAge", "Gertrude"]
   Out[1]= 84

   In[2]:= Quartiles @ Predict["NameAge", "Gertrude", "Distribution"]
   Out[2]= {62.8975, 74.7389, 84.8247}

More info about Predict and Classify here:

http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Predict.html

http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Classify.html

WolframAlpha can handle this, too: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+old+is+mable

My first name is Aubrey, which completely flipped to a girl's name in the US about ten years ago. According to this chart, the fraction of female Aubrey's is approaching 12% at birth. When that fad wears off, it will make a nice spike in the curve for many decades. By the way, Aubrey means "elf leader" or "king of the elves".

www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+old+is+aubrey

This is one of the ways cold readers hone in on all kinds of things about the person they are reading. It is a very effective way to guess someone's mother's or grandmother's name or sister's name. if the audience is a group of mostly 30 to 50 year old women the reader has a good starting point. It goes something like "Is there a Laura or Lisa here?" There is a high probability there will be one of those. Once a woman acknowledges their name is Laura the reader can see what her approx. age is and make a guess about what their mother or grandmother or grandfather's name is. They use other cues to figure out which dead relative the woman is there to "hear" from and then say something like "Someone with a M or K is coming forward" if the target reacted to one of those letters the reader guesses "Mar.... Marg... Mary...Margeret... Margeret... Is that your mother?"...

You get the idea.

I actually used something similar to this (but not as sophisticated) at a previous startup to generate recommendations of people to invite to the app because the app's target demographic was women ages 20-40.

http://jwegan.com/growth-hacking/hacking-mobile-invites-with...

Baby Name Wizard (linked in the article) is one of the true hidden gems on the internet. It looks like a fluffy website for moms-to-be, but then you start poking around at the graphs and you realize that an hour of your life has disappeared...

http://www.babynamewizard.com/

Bonus: This blog post from Baby Name Wizard is utterly fascinating. Everybody I've ever showed this to has been amazed.

http://www.babynamewizard.com/archives/2012/5/the-shape-of-b...

I found the age range on "Jennifer" to be particularly interesting.

My sister Jennifer (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Tilly for details) is in her mid-50s. She was in college before she met another Jennifer her own age. People still are mislead by her name and believe that she has to be a lot younger than she really is.

The moral is that if you have the great fortune to pick a girl's name that will be popular some day but is not now, that girl will probably be happy about it. :-)

I have played poker with Jennifer Tilly a handful of times at wsop. After looking at her Wiki, I realize I was around 15 years off her age. This has less to do with the fact her name is uncommon for her age, and more to do with the fact she doesn't look 55.

Yea, I've always liked her! She has a sister too, that looks even better? Certain genetic combinations age well; she has the right mix. Along with Irish and Mexican.

Don't believe everything you see on the internet! The Irish comes from my father, her step father, and she is not that. And "Mexican" was a common misidentification of Caucasian-Asian mixes before that mix was common. (Remember, at the time she was born, marriage between Chinese and white was illegal in large portions of the country. See "Virginia vs Loving" for more on that.)

Me too. I've met her when she came to Melbourne to play the Aussie Millions several times as well.

On TV she often plays a loveable dumb blonde character. Yet she has/had a blog online somewhere (I'm looking now, cannot find it again) that is well worth reading - she writes like someone who is particularly well read. She is highly intelligent and funny, I wish she had kept it up.

Oh, and she's stunning irrespective of her age. What a wonderful lady.

so according to your username and that wiki page, you are therefore her half-brother ben tilly. your mother is patricia, your father is john ward, and you are from british columbia, specifically texada island.

honestly, i'm not really sure why you would post identifying information on the internet.

edit: just checked your profile. hey ben!

Many posters on Hacker News use identifying profiles, as do I. IMO a very small percentage of comments posted here could be damaging to that person. On the other hand I think that many opportunities can arise from being identifiable here.

Which opportunities?

I've had job offers - none that I've taken though. But there have been other conversations that have been useful.

There is enough identifying information about me out there that there is no point in denying it. That ship sailed for me many years ago. And sometimes it is convenient to be able to say something and have people realize that I have direct experience with it.

Of course you shouldn't believe everything you read on the Internet. Contrary to what you surmised, I was actually born in California, did most of my growing up in Victoria, British Columbia, and Jennifer is not part-Irish.

Now if you want to get disturbed, go read my sister's book, Singing Songs. None of what is discussed there was stuff that I had any control over, so I have no shame about it. And it is all stuff I've said in public before.

As I said, that ship sailed for me long ago. There is no point in hiding it.

I'd no idea she'd written a book. Thanks Ben! As I said her blog was great, I read the entire thing in a single sitting.

Edit. Other sister. Still, I'll give it a look. Talented family you have there.

fuck you. is this really a meaningful thing for you to do? you really have nothing better to do than trace a username? even if it's all public info you're a piece of shit for tracing it for no reason besides outing because you can. fuck off and die you parasite.

Meg is an interesting one too, appearing from nowhere to become popular for ten years from the mid-50s to 60s, then disappearing again. But oh how dreamy she was in the Big Chill.

Source: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=meg&a=*C.meg-_*GivenNam...

She played Darlene in Modern Family! Some hilarious episodes!

I used to work for an NLP startup, we focused on stuff you could do with Romanized names -- names that were original not written in the Latin alphabet and ended up being written in the Latin alphabet using some kind of transliteration scheme.

For example, we could take a name and generate a pretty comprehensive, and culturally aware, list of variants.

Jennifer -> Jenifer, Jen, Jenny, Jennie, etc.

Richard -> Rich, Richie, Dick, Dickie, Ritchard, etc.

Rho -> No, Lo, Loh, Noh, Roh, Ro, Nho, etc.

The intention of course was to build up lists of name variants that could be used during identification checks.

We also had some pretty significant statistical models that could guess Gender and provide a descending list with confidence levels of the most likely country of origin for a name. It was surprisingly accurate and could account for different Romanization schemes popular in different countries. It could even guess if a name was a surname or a given name.

What did we build the models on? Somehow, one of the founders was able to swing access to U.S. Border Control Data. Even though it was names and country of origin data, it's de-identified (having a list of names doesn't mean we know who the names belong to). There was something north of a billion names in the collection, and included place of birth, country of origin, gender, etc. Names were mined for digraphs so we could build CFGs that could be walked to generate variants. There was lots of manual work as well. Endless regex writing and testing, QA, that sort of thing.

For some countries, we had pretty poor data to be honest. I think we had a couple dozen North Koreans, but for most of the world, our coverage was surprisingly good. It turns out all that work boiled down into a surprisingly small library just a couple dozen megabytes in size and was pretty fast -- I don't remember how fast, but something like a few thousand names per hour. It was pretty niche, but eventually the company was acquired and I went on my way.

I always assumed that technology like that would find its way into more applications, but I'm constantly surprised it hasn't.

>'I always assumed that technology like that would find its way into more applications, but I'm constantly surprised it hasn't.'

Many years ago, I was working on a large project for an organization nothing apparently consistent between half a dozen systems with tens of thousands of users each except names. Naturally, those names were full of exactly the kind of variations you're describing.

When I went looking for a solution to do exactly what you're describing I ran into solutions that were both vague about their functionality and expensive. Like you say, pretty niche - it seemed that everyone was used to selling very specific 'solutions' not a library/API.

I ended up hacking together a very basic script to accomplish the same. It took days to run thanks to my non-existent coding skills, but the accuracy was pretty good.

What it couldn't line up was solved by later decoding and discovering correlations between the long forgotten conventions used for unique IDs in the various systems.

Two thoughts:

1. Marketers surely have mined this data to the hilt -- cross-referencing these trends with address lists and full-name email prefixes can make targeted promotions a lot more effective.

2. My own name is relatively rare in the U.S. among my age cohort (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ian) to the point where some adults had problems pronouncing it when I was in elementary school 35 years ago ("Isn't that a girl's name?"). But I suspect, based on anecdotal evidence and personal observation, that the name is more common in England, Scotland, Australia and Canada. And the Wolfram data shows that it has been growing in popularity for many years in the U.S.

I live in Australia and I concur with you, I know quite a few Ian's.

Can we agree to use the plural "their" for ambiguous sex third-person possessive? "His" is sexist, but so is "her", which is distracting on top of that because it isn't conventional.

Interestingly, the article makes clear that it's easier to predict "her" age than "his" age given their name.

It's only distracting because you're not used to it. Solution: get used to it.

I don't think replacing one sexist thing with another is progress.

It's not sexist. Sometimes you use one pronoun, sometimes another. Or you can say "his or her", or "their", or whatever you feel like for any given situation.

Edit: it's not ambiguous. The person in the title is a hypothetical single person. Whoever wrote the headline decided that the person they made up was feminine.

Nope, I doubt we could all agree on that.

Using ‘her’ instead of ‘his’ is hardly sexist. That’s completely absurd. If it’s used consciously to make a statement there is no issue, at least not for another few centuries or so.

I merely meant that the sentence should agree with itself. If you want to talk about a woman, write "How to Tell A Woman’s Age When All You Know Is Her Name".

I don't see anything sexist in the article? Or are all uses of gendered pronouns to be banned?

No, we certainly shouldn't ban them. But "someone" is ambiguous, so the possessive used later in the sentence should be as well.

It's only ambiguous absent other information and the second half of the sentence provides that. So now it is someone whose identity we do not know, but we do know that the someone is female.

That is commonplace for non-gendered terms, but in this case the article relates more particularly to women.

I don't think "his" and "her" are sexist per se, though men tend to use the former and women the latter when referring to a theoretical or nongendered person or whatever. "His or her" everyone seems to agree is bulky, and fringe-use alternatives like "zyr" or something don't have nearly the mindspace to suggest as a reasonable alternative.

>though men tend to use the former and women the latter when referring to a theoretical or nongendered person or whatever //

Any evidence to support that assertion? If one isn't comfortable using the neutral pronouns - identical as they are with the masculine pronouns in English - the tendency is to use [singular] "they" or "his or her" IME (anecdotal as that is). I don't find women generally choose to use feminine pronouns more unless they're trying to make a point in doing so.

Example: suppose there is a sentence "Each Cub Scout must build and light a fire in order to gain his backwoodsman badge". People, myself included, will tend towards saying "gain their backwoodsman badge" rather than choosing to say "his backwoodsman badge" or "her backwoodsman badge" according to the speakers sex. Of course some people will also get upset about the gender neutrality of words that end "man".

As someone that's not a native english speaker, can I ask you why "his" is sexist?

A quick read of a dictionary (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/his) says that his is "the possessive form of he", and the second definition of "he" is "anyone (without reference to sex)". That's also what I got taught in middle/high school.

Sorry if I'm just missing something and this is a stupid question.

IIRC studies show the 'generic' he isn't so generic; speakers will picture a man.

Because it leads to a default assumption of a male actor which has often been relied upon to exclude women, especially from career roles. While a writer or speaker may intend a term generically, readers and listeners often infer (or pretend to infer) the gendered meaning.

For example, consider the following headline 'What you can tell about a doctor from the sort of shoes he wears.' You're probably not picturing any women's shoes when you read that.

Something is sexist when language users think it is. The problem with he/him/his is that the primary meaning refers to males, only. Because of that, anyone reading it gets pushed towards the primary meaning.

That's why some people push towards the use of the singular they (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they) That may eventually change the language for all.

'Singular they' is common in the UK and quite a few commonwealth countries, as well as in Ireland. While it occasionally gives rise to ambiuity, I certainly find it less confusing than randomly-selected gendered pronouns, which suggests a specificity that is often not present.

On this article, the hedline led me to think that there was something distinctive about the distribution of female names that made it far easier to guess (not tell) someone's age if they were female rather than male.

A better headline that more accurately reflected the actual content, avoided unnecessary gender classification and grammatical ambiguities would have been 'How to guess Americans' ages from their names.'

Not sure why you're being downvoted. I'm pretty particular about grammatical correctness but I've come around to thinking that singular "their" is a reasonable approach. I wouldn't necessarily call "his" sexist but, especially when used in the context of certain occupations for example, it does perpetuate a stereotype. And interspersing random "hers" calls attention to itself and is distracting.

There's also precedent with thou and you although that evolution was a bit more complicated and isn't quite the same thing.

Read the article.

It specifically mentions that girls names are generally more constrained in time, so the technique they use works better on women.

That seems like a tenuous argument at best. What I got from the article was that it examined both genders, and that women tended to fall into line with this method slightly more. It would be a different story if it were developed as a method for gauging women's ages, and extrapolated to men - your reasoning would hold then.

Forcing the use of "her" instead of "his" is just as sexist. If we want to improve the mental model of the listener (reader) through the use of language, then we should make a conscious effort to be correct instead of argumentative, and say "his or her" or "their".

No, I will use 'he,' because I speak and write English, not *English.

We originally changed it to "their", but quickly reverted it because "her" is relevant to the content here. Would that we could as easily "revert" this dreadful subthread—but we'll content ourselves with marking it off-topic.

Singular "they" is perfectly good, perfectly historic English (there have been countless HN threads on this, with copious citations) and it's only a matter of time till the convention goes back to being generally accepted and eliminates the pronoun gender problem [1]. In the meantime, let's restrain ourselves from having flamewars about it.

1. Which we only have because of meddling 18th and 19th-century prescriptivist grammarians in the first place. Thanks, meddling prescriptivist grammarians!

Can you explain your footnote a bit more? Pronouns are a closed class, so I have a hard time believing some prescriptivists could have changed the way normal people use pronouns.

This turns out to be a little harder to dig up from HN Search than I thought, so I've made a list of some of my favorite links on the topic. If you find any other high-quality ones, please let me know—there are several I couldn't easily find again in five minutes. I know Language Log has had many good posts about it.

There are many memorable details in this history, such as that the first English grammarian to prescribe generic 'he' was a successful female entrepreneur (who ironically was mostly an anti-prescriptivist), and that the name of another was the delightfully apropos Sir Charles Coote.

http://www.siu-voss.net/Androcentrism_in_prescriptive_gramma...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/magazine/26FOB-onlanguage-...

http://www.damninteresting.com/when-they-became-him/

http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-th...

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.h...

http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/sgtheirl.html

http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austhlis.html

Agreed. And we need to agree to make words like "data" and "media" group nouns?

...and her nationality.

I'm British. I know two women called Deirdre. They're both Irish. It seems that the name had fallen out of favour in Britain by the 70s, but was still fashionable in Ireland until at least the 80s.

Could be related to the character on the long-running primetime soap Coronation Street. She started in 1972.

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

Corry's been shown in Ireland since 1978.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronation_Street#International...

Not saying it's not the reason for the divergence, but it seems less likely.

A lot of Irish households have access to British TV stations like BBC, ITV etc. and could have watched it there.

Since Deirdre is an Irish name, it is possible that the decline in popularity (among the general population) in the UK was at least partly due to increased anti-Irish sentiment in the 1970s.

There is a lot of variation in names by nationality. Lots of Irish names (esp. female names) can be very hard to pronounce, such as Aoife, Oonagh, Caoimhe, Niamh, etc.

The Wizard of Oz was released in 1939, so it makes sense that the median age for Dorothy's is around 75 years of age.

I wonder what other pop culture events influenced naming trends.

Check for patterns here: http://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/top5names.html

From 1954 - 1998 The boy name Michael reigned supreme. I'm sure this run had a lot to do with the ArchAngel, the Basketball player, and the pop star.

Don't forget about the kid who liked Life cereal.

Wouldn't we expect the mode to be 75, while the median and mean would be younger? Assuming, of course, that Wizard of Oz produced any sort of lasting increase on the popularity of Dorothy as a name.

The median is actually not 75 exactly, I looks to be 74ish on the graph. This makes sense.

I wouldn't expect a lasting increase more of a S curve. Movie comes out, there is a spike in Dorothy usage. A few years pass and the original spike slows down. Then the movie is seen as old fashioned and you start to see a negative trend. Then Dorothy is seen as an old lady's name so it sees an even sharper decline.

True, and with the population growing generally we'd see it pushed back toward that spike...

I'm guessing that the Twilight book and movie series has something to do with the rapid rise in popularity of the name "Isabella."

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=isabella

I bet Liam Neeson is the reason for the new wave of Liams, but I can't decide whether the Karate Kid remake is the reason for the wave of Jaydens, or if it's just a coincidence.

http://names.yafla.com/#n=Jayden&s=mt

Coincidence. The name started its ascent in the mid 90s.

Not necessarily. Liam Neeson was the star of the 1993 film "Schindler's List." It won 7 Academy awards in 1994, including best picture.

Jayden from the Karate Kid is part of the wave of Jaydens (and -dens in general).

You'll like this. Maps of top girls names by state by year.

http://jezebel.com/map-sixty-years-of-the-most-popular-names...

I've noticed my name, Bret, spiked in popularity in 1959 and 1982, corresponding nicely with the TV shows 'Maverick' and 'Bret Maverick'. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=bret

A few examples:

Tabitha http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=tabitha Rise begins right around the second season of _Bewitched_ when the character Tabitha was introduced; peak (maybe coincidentally) appears to be around the short-lived 1977 spinoff series.

Michelle http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=michelle The rise in popularity was probably influenced by the Beatles song (released in December 1965).

Shirley http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=shirley The peak appears to correspond to the height of Shirley Temple's film career in the mid-to-late 1930s.

Samantha was an obscure name until 1964:

http://www.babynamewizard.com/archives/2010/7/samantha-the-u...

I was curious about one of the deadest male names, Isadore, so I looked it up. It's of Greek origin and it turns out the female counterpart, Isadora, is the ninth most popular name for baby girls in Chile in 2006. The website linked from the article indicates that it's never ranked in the top 1000 in the US. Interesting how a shared, ancient name could be so wildly divergent in usage.

Usually I see the male version as Isidore. Isadora I've only ever heard of with Isadora Duncan.

Kirk Douglas was known as Isadore Demsky when he grew up in Amsterdam NY in the early 20th Century.

Apparently it was a popular male name for immigrants and first generation children in the early 20th Century. It was often shortened to "Izzy."

There was a social trend in America during the middle of the 20th Century to "anglicize" names. For example, I have uncles who changed their birth name in the early 50s from "Wozniak" to "Wagner." Even Izzy Demsky became Kirk Douglas when he grew up.

Let's take for example, the children in "the Godfather" books, The older children have "old country" names (Santino, Fredo) and the younger children have "new world" names (Michael, Connie.) It's almost as if the older kids "Americanize" the family when they go to school.

Anyhow, names are funny things when taken in aggregate.

My immigrant grandparents named my mother an anglicized version of their intended name after pressure from the older children, who said, "In America you say ____, not ____". I think there is probably something to the theory that the family gets more Americanized as the older children are raised in American culture and "correct" some of their parents' old world ways.

The combination of the SSA babynames data, which is very cool and deep on its own, with the SSA actuarial data is pretty neat, partly because I hadn't known about the actuarial data set...but when I saw that the OP had tried to calculate surviving persons of a given name and birth year, I assumed that they just used the SSA's death database...from until at least 2010, the SSA had a list of every SSA person who has died and also, when they were born, and also, their social security numbers. Since the SSN, until relatively recently, was indicative of what state the SSN-holder was actually born...well, that, combined with the babynames-per-state data, could get you very granular calculations...I'm sure the SSA's actuarial table gets it pretty much within an acceptable margin of error, but who knows, maybe some awkwardly named people were doomed to a shorter lifespan? (I'm only half joking, I think)

> what state the SSN-holder was actually born

No, it was the state where the SSN was issued. Not all children applied for an SSN at birth. Centralization of SS offices also altered this practice.

See, e.g., http://www.ssa.gov/history/ssn/geocard.html

The assumption that death rates have no link to names will probably break down in some cases.

This was your subtle way of saying that the average lifespan for a typical Afro-American name is lower, right? :)

It's ok to differentiate things amongst races sometimes -- it isn't always racist.

That was certainly an example, but I moved away from it for generality (and brevity), not concerns over racial tension.

More broadly there are doubtless correlations to various demographics (income, education level, etc.) that have different life expectancies. Though race is certainly one. (As, obviously, is gender.)

Would be interesting to apply it to a group of friends. Since they're likely to be similar ages, you should be able to get an improved guess from combining the distributions for all of their names.

"The peak year for boys named Joseph was 1914 — when about 39,000 of them were born. Those 1914 Josephs would be due to celebrate their 100th birthdays at some point this year. But only about 130 of them were still alive as of Jan. 1."

Something quite poignant in this. I'd be interested in seeing a life expectancy chart based on name.

I'm pretty sure that would be "a life expectancy chart". It's pretty unlikely that your name has any impact on your life expectancy. But, since name popularity is influenced quite a bit by social/cultural status, and those do affect life expectancy, you'd probably see some differences along those lines.

Great comment!

In case anyone is interested, there have been some studies done where researchers send in two identical resumes. The only difference is that one has a traditionally 'white' sounding name, whereas the other has a name more associated with minorities. The 'white' sounding name performs better in these types of tests.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/20...

^ This article gives some more information, including an interesting story about two brothers named Winner and Loser. The most relevant quote, however, comes right at the end:

"The data show that, on average, a person with a distinctively black name—whether it is a woman named Imani or a man named DeShawn—does have a worse life outcome than a woman named Molly or a man named Jake. But it isn't the fault of his or her name. If two black boys, Jake Williams and DeShawn Williams, are born in the same neighborhood and into the same familial and economic circumstances, they would likely have similar life outcomes. But the kind of parents who name their son Jake don't tend to live in the same neighborhoods or share economic circumstances with the kind of parents who name their son DeShawn. And that's why, on average, a boy named Jake will tend to earn more money and get more education than a boy named DeShawn. DeShawn's name is an indicator—but not a cause—of his life path."

(Levitt and Dubner, "A Roshanda by any other name")

Did FiveThirtyEight steal this idea from Business Insider? http://www.businessinsider.com/popular-girl-boy-names-2014-5 They did the same research a week ago.

They were probably both inspired by Social Security Administration's release of name data for 2013 a couple of weeks ago:

http://www.socialsecurity.gov/pressoffice/pr/2014/babynames2...

This analysis has been done countless times by countless different people, so it seems a little presumptive to attribute it to one organization or author. Name data is available and is something that we all can relate to, so it gets an easy readership.

Somewhat related, here's the latest NIST results for age estimation based on face photographs (PDF):

http://www.nist.gov/customcf/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=915238

Xavier? Logan? Guess someone wants to have his son grow up as the Wolverine.

It's surprising that Jacob isn't one of the top 25 most common male names considering that it's been the most popular male baby name for 14 of the past 15 years.

The list is the 25 most popular names since 1900.

I assume its the 25 most popular names of the living. But either way I would have expected the most popular male baby name for 14 consecutive years to make the list.

Baby Boomer generation.

That's very interesting.

Anyone knows some sort of service or website where you input a particular name and then gives you statistics like the average age of persons with the name given?

Can someone tell what software was in used to products charts ?

Nate Silver willed them into existence.

I often wonder this about newspaper ones as well. I guess graphic designers custom make a fairly large amount.

How can y'all not know 'bout R?

http://www.r-project.org

...just kidding, lots of people don't know about R, but check it out, because it's pretty badass!

I'd be curious to know if people still use Processing, professionally?

http://processing.org

We developed our own tool, based on https://github.com/Quartz/Chartbuilder that uses Javascript and d3 to draw charts.

Amusing. My brother and I are almost smack on the median of our names. Yet I was named after my father (and his father), my brother after our mother's father.

Its great to be unpredictable (Owen, slightly older than 8).

Baby names, is this the new wave of data journalism?

I hope so! I thought it was pretty interesting to look at the data backwards like this.

Baby names were heavily discussed in Freakonomics as indicators of a variety of things. An interesting read if you like this sort of data. Relevant content: http://freakonomics.com/tag/baby-names/

Yes- Modern baby names are status symbols and are treated like a branding exercise by many helicopter-parents. Its both topical and relevant to the world we live in. As is the analytic exercise of extrapolation from incomplete but meaningul sub-sets of otherwise random-seeming data. Its the data-equivalent of found-object art, another past-time of the 20th century aspiring middle-classes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_object

I've just been travelling through Singapore and was astonished to come across young women named Agnes and Gertrude.

My name is Sebastian, which was extremely popular in Germany in the early 80s (not once was I the only Sebastian in the classroom). In the USA people would now imagine a small child when hearing my name. It's very interesting how different popular names are in different countries.

Was that perhaps influenced by the name "Bastian" for the main character of Ende's 1979 book "The Never-Ending Story" (Die Unendliche Geschichte in the original German)?

I was searching for a link to download the data (a csv maybe) for me to play with. Did someone find a link?

http://www.socialsecurity.gov/OACT/babynames/limits.html has links.

Thanks!

sorry if someone already posted it, but you can also get an estimate on where they live :)

http://jezebel.com/map-sixty-years-of-the-most-popular-names...

This totally nailed my Mom. That sounds worse than I meant it.

That's very much culture / language / country specific. Naturally societies tend to have certain preferences in names in different time periods. But those only a tendencies, not a set in stone set of names.

I wonder how names with alternate spelling fit in?

My app, DrillbitApp.com, uses the same data to run on marketing lists. Also does race and gender.

Amazing that the oldest male names do not include biblical Old Testament names but the youngest male names do! A sign of increasing religious fundamentalism?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com