> Of the 42 names that moved toward girls, 34 were driven mainly by an increase among girls, rather than a decline among boys.
> Surprisingly, the same pattern held in the opposite direction. Of the 12 names that moved toward boys, 9 shifted mainly because fewer girls were receiving them, rather than because more boys were. In other words, whichever way a name moved, the biggest change usually came from girls.
This is consistent with the observation that girl's names are more dynamic.
I have no data but feel that boys tend to get the family names and biblical names (in US anyways). It's rare to hear of a girl named Elizabeth III or Mary Junior but quite common for those concepts in boys. So I think the boy names are heavily weighted on probably the most popular ~25 or so names. Since girl names are more free to follow whatever is fashionable at the time, trends move faster.
My son is named after his grandfather, and it's an overly common name in English (American and British). Definitely a top 3 most common for last several centuries
I thought girls didn't use junior, III, etc. because traditionally girls adopt their husband's last name, so they would no longer have the same full name as their mother.
I hadn’t thought about that but makes me wonder if it will become more common since not taking your husbands name has become more common. I wouldn’t think so, but I’m pushing 50 and can’t think of ever meeting a female named after her mom so if it shows up at all in the data that would be interesting.
Funny enough, I think it’s common for the female middle name to be a mom/grandma/aunt name.
Family legacy is quite obsolete in modern society.
Not every society wants to be modern.
Modern society cuts family ties which is a lot of times not so great, but on the other hand it saves lots of people from abusive relationships.
Once you can leave abusive parents or siblings, whole world of opportunities opens. Then again on the other hand not everyone can deal with such a freedom.
Yet still I am personally supportive of modern approaches where people can choose their destiny and not being tied to a family legacy.
At least in France, it means the father leaves and the kid doesn't have enough money to study — and we're transitioning to the workplace providing the funding for studies (apprenticeships where the company pays 10k€ per year, empoverishing the worker).
I'd rather see the name of the father be stuck to the kid so if he's a failure, everyone knows who failed him.
Please don't vaguepost on hn. It's hard to guess if this is an attack or a defense of the nuclear family (us other commenters would have to guess if you know how recent that phenomenon is).
Therefore, you just invite confusing answers and useless discussions in your reply.
Please don't gatekeep hn posts. Comments with little interests will receive little replies and others will rise. You adding a reply helps the post you dislike rise over others.
The idea of surnames is an anthropologically recent tradition. Humans living in small communities had no practical need for multiple names. Surnames mostly arise in societies with relatively strong centralized states so that the government has an easier time tracking its citizens (census-taking, tax collecting, etc.).
The idea of being named after your father (or your husband for that matter) is much older than surnames. Don't know exactly how old, because written history is only available for strong centralized states, but at least biblical times.
Yes, but the context of this thread is about taking your father's surname specifically. Even "modern societies" where wives might have the option to not take their husband's surname aren't moving away from naming sons after their fathers, as far as their given name goes.
I meant the "John son of Jack" thing. It was extremely common for thousands of years across pretty much every European culture, and Jews (likely other people too but IDK). Eventually it transformed into surnames by Jackson. The important part is that surnames didn't introduce the idea of father's name being part of your name even if you're not named after him. This was already widely practiced, surnames just streamlined the process and made ancestry more trackable (though some countries still use the old rules to this day. Spain I think, and Iceland maybe?)
Dunno about other cultures, but in Poland it was very common until relatively recently to refer to wives/daughters by a suffixed first name (not surname) of the husband/father. If Mary Higgins married Jack Smith, from then on she'd be known as Jackowa, and their daughter Betty would be called Jackówna. This is distinct from naming children after their ancestors. The custom predates surnames by hundreds of years, but served essentially the same role of tying the women to their men.
That is a bit cliché isn't it? According to INSEE in France 12% of the kids were in shared custody and that is the mean. At 10 y old it is around 15%. And around 24% of the fathers get full custody.
So while there is a bias towards mother custody of the kids (around 2/3), there is still 1/3 of the kids where it is not the case.
Also, not having full custody of kids doesn't mean the father is leaving completely from the kids life. More often than not the kids need to stay with one parent because job and cost of living forces them to be more regionally apart (only 37% of kids living in same town). That doesn't mean the father do not see the kids in the weekends/holidays nor contribute financially to study.
So the reality is way more nuanced than you make it out to be in a small comment.
Why not have him take the Maiden name so everyone can know the mother who failed him?
Why do you frame it as only fathers can fail children? Or only men can do wrong? Women can pay for studies as well, and have just as much duty to their children.
All the men on my dad's side of the family have the same middle name, with just a different first name.
It's apparently not an uncommon tradition in several areas of the world to either have either the first or middle name be shared, and then a unique name for the unmatched one (e.g. John Alan Doe, John James Doe, John Matthew Doe - Alan John Doe, James John Doe, Matthew John Doe).
Eastern Europe of the Slavic variety enters the chat with a concept of patronymics. Nobody asks you if you want to have a middle name, it's always a deriative of your father's, by law.
My son was born in a country with doesn't write those in a birth certificate. When we went back, guess what -- they still added it by deriving it from my name.
There is a small trend of using very old names like this, not necessarily biblical but just old sounding. We know an elementary aged girl named Lydia and I always think the last person I knew by that name was my great-great grandmother.
Anecdata: I’m a guy and a III. My son almost was a IV but we chose another first name and used my (and my dad’s and my grandfather’s) name for his middle name. My great grandfather had a different name, but I think his dad and maybe grandfather had the same name as me.
Not to offend, but I think it has declined because this naming of Jr, III, and so on has come to be associated with poor or rural people. For what it’s worth, I have a relative who is a IV
This appears not to have been rigorously studied. Anecdotally, the further west one goes in America the higher the likelihood a suffix indicates low SES.
Well it’s likely the adoption by the Latinx. I think that demo grows as you move west. In Texas it’s become more common in that demo and the redneck whites. The monied still have it but more commonly go towards super preppy names like Tripp, Shep, Archer, Preston. A common theme I see if you dig deeper is they name one of the boys the mom’s maiden surname. But in general, surnames as first names is very common in this demo. I mostly exist in this demo of WASPs and my wife has I think 4+ cousins named in the mom maiden name format, I didn’t realize it was a bigger thing until we had kids and learned a lot of our friends had also done this (I thought maybe just unique to my wife’s family, but bigger trend). My family wasn’t monied so I wasn’t really exposed to it until adulthood.
Sorry to bring up race but it’s the US and the SES is too highly correlated to ignore these in a data conversation and we all do things slightly differently roughly by race/background, there’s no monoculture in the US
Eh, in my experience it’s all over the place. Scottsdale’s suffixes are largely not Latin. Instead, it probably indicates someone who sells real estate or crypto.
Fun part is that no one can stop poor people from imitating rich ones, so they do. Then rich ones start coming up with other ways to show to the others that they’re rich and poor copy over and over again.
I guess latest wave would be “Techno Mechanicus” or whatever the other silly names we heard lately.
I used rich as shorthand placeholder of blue blood, noble, famous and rich. Not everyone who is rich is noble and noble doesn’t mean they are rich.
There have historically been a lot of ways poor people were stopped from imitating rich ones, and not just the obvious ones involving spending money. The US is pretty enlightened in that there are no name protection laws that I know of. In many European countries, you still need permission from every carrier of a rare last name if you want to take it.
coming from europe: in my experience "fancy names" are either blue blood wealth OR regular people wanting to look like blue blood wealth. So I feel you both have a point here.
"Junior" might be associated with poor or rural people, but "III" and "IV" can only convey the absolute maximum level of pompousness.
(There was a brief period where my sister was dating someone who went by J.T. The initials were something of an effort to obscure his name, James III.)
Or 3 James was confusing so they probably had a James, a Jim, a JT. No attempt to obscure just trying to yell at a specific person when the trash needs to be taken out.
I know a lot of people that just go by their middle names in this scenario. Even my brother was named like this and the intent from the beginning was he’d go by his middle name.
I think maximum pompousness goes to those that make sure you know they’re a third or fourth. If I meet you at a cocktail party and will never meet you again, don’t introduce yourself as William H Gates the Third, just say Bill.
I’d agree the trend is waning if that’s what you’re getting at but I think it is baked into the history of this dataset and is also still significantly more common for boys than girls
Also, IV is really quite rare for boys too. Junior still super common.
I have Junior in my legal name - it's the bane of my existence when it comes to legal forms because of how inconsistent various systems handle it, even for different government systems. This became especially true after 9/11 and the Patriot Act pushed these systems to update and go digital because they couldn't get their act together to coordinate for years.
Ferenc Puskás the Hungarian footballer had grown up with the nickname Öcsi, meaning little brother. Later when he got old he was referred to as Puskás Öcsi bácsi, meaning Uncle Little Brother Puskás...
On some forms in the US, it's listed as a suffix. Some agencies enforce it, others do not (SSA does not, for example). And colloquially, when"Senior" dies, the son often stops using "Junior" (though that's not a legal change).
UK, Can, and AUS are similar, but not exactly the same as the US. And NSW in AUS complicates matters by outright prohibiting roman numberals are Jnr/Snr suffixes. Mexico has more restrictions due to the mothers-last-name, fathers-last-name naming convention.
Personally, I dig the Nordic and Arabic "x, son of y, son of z, son of..." patterns.
How the heck can one state of Australia prohibit certain types of names? Doesn't that cause all kinds of problems with documentation mismatches if someone moves?
Dunno, but Iceland also enforces it's son-of/daughter-of naming convention to the point some names are explicitly prohibited (or is it explicitly allowed, I forget if it's a black-list or white-list).
They don’t change names when they move. The names are registered in the location of birth.
But your name might get mangled in some states if it doesn’t fit, same as it might in the US if some system doesn’t properly handle, e.g., multiple middle names or special punctuation.
It's not unusual for someone to change their name when immigrating. Have you met anyone in your presumably English-speaking country who wrote their name in Korean characters? Probably not because they convert it to the nearest allowed name.
>Have you met anyone in your presumably English-speaking country who wrote their name in Korean characters? Probably not because they convert it to the nearest allowed name.
Having a list of "allowed" names implies another list of "disallowed" names. I am not aware (including names with non 7-bit ASCII characters) of any such list of names that aren't legally allowed to be used.
I'd note that the artist formerly known as Ƭ̵̬̊ legally changed their name to that symbol here in my "presumably English-speaking" country.
I am not aware of any such restrictions where I live. Perhaps it's just where you do?
Not so long. My grandfather, born 1908 in Norway, kept the proper patronym as a middle name since he would otherwise have the same full name as his father. Everyone had to take fixed last names by 1923, but it wasn't uncommon to keep the patronym as a middle name like my grandfather did.
Off topic, but this makes me realize one of my grandfathers was born in the 1890s, which is possibly getting rare. Time passes swiftly by. This very day your life is shorter by one and all that.
I won’t forgot when my small child clarified that I was born in 19 something not 18 something, two equally remote times to him.
On the list my middle name was listed as a name going from male to female - I think the first time I have seen anything about this name out in print in public.
My first and middle names are John and Richard. A couple of times on trips to the US people have read my initials as 'Jr'. Very surprising the first time! Has never happened to me in the UK.
> I have no data but feel that boys tend to get the family names and biblical names (in US anyways).
Or both: the family names having been chosen originally from biblical names, but not continuing for that reason.
I'm a David, and there were many Davids in my University intake year, but I suspect that has less to do with the Bible and more to do with mothers of a certain age range having interests in the Davids Bowie or Essex (or both! - quite possible in my mother's case).
She didn't get the suffix until her 20s. And it was not used to distinguish her from her mother (who was also a Queen Elizabeth) but from yet another Elizabeth who lived centuries earlier.
Same with the current king Charles III of England. He is the first of that name to be king of the UK (and Canada, Australia, etc). Maybe people should revert to multiple ordinals, like James VI and I in 1603.
I don't think that's right - well, Canada and Australia ofc. The "U" in "UK" refers to James IV of Scotland becoming James of England, thus uniting the states of Albion. Charles succeeded him.
Scotland and England were not united into a single Kingdom of Great Britain until 1707 (under Queen Anne), and it did not become the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Ireland) until 1800 (under George III). So technically the "U" actually refers to union of Britain and Ireland, not England and Scotland.
Before the Acts of Union of 1707, England and Scotland were not united into one kingdom, but two kingdoms that shared the same king under a personal union.
It seems there are lots of cases across the board where "women adopt traditionally male thing" has become the norm in this timeframe but not many where "men adopt traditionally female thing" at quite the same rate or scale.
Yeah, a woman wearing pants to an office job became totally normal. A man wearing a dress or skirt would be assumed to be transitioning gender or wearing a costume.
Women used to be arrested for wearing pants many places, and still kept doing it until it was normal and legal. I don’t think straight men had the same motivation to push for the right to wear skirts; if they did that would be normal too.
Straight men wear "kilts" or "sarongs". If you think either is not entirely and unarguably straight and male I would invite you to repeat your views in certain places....
I live in a place in North America where it is not uncommon to see men in kilts. Still, you can safely assume that anyone you encounter in such attire is attending a formal function or cultural event. While it may be gendered as masculine, it is not a norm for everyday dress.
There sure are. I wish there was some clause though that any law not used in a court of law for say 30 years, has to be actively renewed to not expire. From time to time, malicious actors try to abuse such laws.
Quite rare, but there is the occasional Scotts-descendant who wears a kilt to work --on occasion--. They are not skirts but they are similar in the way that a blouse is not a shirt but is very similar.
That is the pattern. Rarely would you have a baby boy using a women's name. Broadly speaking there is a general stigma within society going the other direction then women adopting male things.
The simple explanation is that parents don't want to give their sons gender-ambiguous names, but are more open to it for daughters. This is consistent with all of the dynamics described in the article.
Not sure if this is universal, but when my wife and I were thinking about naming our son, we observed that in Spain there seems to be much more variety of girl than boy names.
In fact, you can almost prove it by bijective mapping to a subset. Almost all typical boy names have a feminine version (Juan->Juana, Carlos->Carla/Carlota, Manuel->Manuela, Adrián->Adriana, and so on... there are some exceptions, but not many) while the opposite is not true, there are plenty of common girl names without masculine version (Laura, Marta, Elena, Carmen, Sara, and many others).
There are also papers doing the actual stats and concluding that girl names are more diverse. No idea what the reason is.
That’s completely normal in many countries, Germany for example doesn’t let you pick offensive or clearly-bad names for the child. You can’t call your kid Hässlich (Ugly) for example.
You can also not use X12-Whatever-Allowed-In-US.
But apart from that, there’s no list, you can invent names.
“If the first name you want for your child is not on the list of approved names, you can apply to have it approved. You do this when you complete the application, where you are asked to explain why you want a non-approved first name.”
I think that’s a bit clearer than getting a veto, as vetos without a whitelist can get applied inconsistently.
Some European states do that, or place restrictions.
In here, for example, the name needs approval to not be harmful to the kid, nor degrading, nor diminutive form of name can be used. Also typos are checked for.
If you give it some thought, it becomes obvious that since any name is used in many public settings, society/state has a legitimate case to prevent offensive naming. That is different from state literally creating an allowlist. The huge middleground is benign names that are in no way offensive but still require you to get an approval from the state. I think this is an overreach, ymmv
In order to lighten the administrative burden that occurs when society/state has a legitimate case to prevent offensive naming, society is likely to create an approve list.
Denmark did use to have "These and only these names" and they were written into the law (yes, there are pages and pages of Danish legislation that are just names), but now any non-offensive name is okay, and for administrative purposes, an "approved"-list is kept for easy reference to things that have already been, well, approved.
I don't think that's unusual. In my country there isn't a fixed official list, but the law says you need to use an actual name (it can be a foreign one). If it seems too crazy it might be denied.
People here find it very strange (insane even) that in US you can name your child Apple, North West or X Æ A-Xii.
Yep, came to a similar conclusion for other countries too. Together with the fact that a lot of boy's names either feel old or overused, you don't really have the variety of names you get for girls.
Girls get flowers, gemstones, places, etc. while boys get old grandpa names.
In many western cultures [1] it was (still is, but to a much lesser degree) customary for boy's (especially for the eldest) names to be hereditary. This gives natural tendency for the set of "traditional" boy names to be self reinforcing: remain more closed and maintain relative relevance. There are simply less boys to play with naming.
On top of that, it was common for the eldest son to inherit the estate and produce more offspring, while the younger were much more likely to be enlisted and as a result suffer from early-adulthood mortality. This further reinforces the traditional names.
I wonder how these statistics would look like if it was possible to control for these effects. Maybe look at variety of names among fallen soldiers versus the general population with some time lag?
> Almost all typical boy names have a feminine version
If I were to warrant a guess, I would say this is to quite a large degree an effect of the first-born being a girl and getting a feminized version of the hereditary name.
I was thinking about this in terms of products recently. Gendered products tend to move from men to women, but rarely the other way around. High heels, Chuck Taylors, motorcycles, etc.
Some products do move the other way but it is a slow process: massages, wet wipes (Dude Wipes anyone?), manicures, etc. But I think a good majority of products marketed to women have a much harder time crossing over.
>Some products do move the other way but it is a slow process: massages, wet wipes (Dude Wipes anyone?), manicures, etc. But I think a good majority of products marketed to women have a much harder time crossing over.
Names, appearance, gender-related behavior is generally more fluid for females in America currently.
A different somewhat topic-related comment: I have a friend named Darakshan -- he took up his Sufi name (his birth name was David). Darakshan is generally considered a female name in Persian-Urdu culture -- I don't know whether he and his American Sufi friends who gave him that name were aware of that ... not that it matters; it does suit him. ("Bright," "shining," "radiant," "brilliant," or "luminous")
> This is consistent with the observation that girl's names are more dynamic.
Interesting, I wonder what causes this? In the US, is more common to name the first son after the father. Given this data comes from US social security information, that definitely has an impact.
There are a few names I think are being confused. Jan, short for Janice is a female name, but Jan in Central / Eastern Europe as a form of John is masculine. Jean the female name and Jean the french male name are different.
This is part of what they mean by girl names driving the shift. You have a traditional ethnic name that may be masculine or feminine and has a baseline low level of popularity. Then you have a popular female name that rapidly gains and loses its popularity. The effect on the mix is that it's shifting from masculine to feminine, but really you should look at it as a newly-popular female name being layered on top of the traditional name. And you can often see this in the timescale, with a clear pop-culture trigger leading to the rising girl name.
Looking at just part of the data, I can see this with Arya (Stark, Game of Thrones), Paris (Hilton), Stevie (Nicks, of Fleetwood Mac), Dakota (Fanning), and Tatum (O'neal), and the masculine trend also relates to the fading of generationally-popular names like Jean (Silent/Boomer), Pat (Boomer), Joan (Silent/Boomer), Courtney (Gen-X/Xennial), etc.
I was actually surprised to see Trinity in the list. Not only does it remind me of The Matrix (1999), I also don't think I've ever encountered someone with that as a real name.
Don't forget Madison[1] (Splash[2]). My guess is that the majority of names prior to 1984 are clerical errors where the surname was entered as the given name.
I was going to say the same about Jean; I think that one at least is hard to really draw conclusions from without additional data like languages spoken at home.
Anecdotally, the boy->girl names are almost all very popular names where I've met multiple each of those across different ages, whereas the other two categories feel like they have a lot more down-list entries.
At various times over the years I have had access to long lists of real names, membership lists for different orgs, that sort of thing, and one thing that stands out is that the real variety of names exceeds what I expected. So many weird and funny names. I love looking thru the lists; even movie credits are long enough to have some gems in them. People, perhaps especially during pregnancy, have some very idiosyncratic thoughts.
Very likely it's their family name. Kim is the most common family name in Korea. Most Korean given names are two characters (=2 syllables) and more difficult to pronounce and memorize for westerners. And because of the space inserted between two romanized syllables (Jong Un), they are often misunderstood as middle + given names.
Kim is the name of the protagonist of one of the most popular boys' novels of all time, and there are a number of examples of well known male Kims from the twentieth century.
In Britain we had the very famous MI6 Intelligence office Kim Philby who was also a Russian spy, he was a key part of the Cambridge Five spy ring.
What I didn't know until just now is Kim was just a nickname. He was Harold Adrian Russell Philby and apparently Nicknamed "Kim" after the boy-spy in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim[2] which surely foreshadowed his career!!
I think that's an example of what he's talking about. Jean-Luc is pronounced "John Luke" whereas the feminine form is Gene. And similarly the male Jan is pronounced Yan.
Probably more in the US. In the UK John and Jean (with a french pronunciation) sound completely different. John has a hard O sound, and Jean has a soft J and an elongated aw sound
I am not a native English or French speaker but the way I've heard Luke being said in UK/US English and the way I have heard the filmmaker's name pronounced that Luc doesn't really sound like Luke. I feel the u and c are shorter and subdued.
Yeah and Jean is pronounced more like 'Jawn' but I just mean it's a clearly male name in either case, as opposed to Jean pronounced 'Gene' which is generally a female name, though oddly 'Gene' also pronounced the same is generally a male name.
My biggest WTF on this (as a foreigner) was the late Lindsey Graham. I always knew Lindsey/Lindsay as a female name.
Either way, peeking through the list, seems to me names which end with a vowel are usually feminine. However, there's a caveat: names end up shortened, and over time even those get shortened.
'Brit', 'Britney' for 'Brittany'.
'Gerry' or 'Geri' or 'Ger' for 'Gareth' (Dutch variant: 'Gerrit'),
'Pat', 'Patty' for 'Patrick', 'Patricia'.
'Pen', 'Penny' for 'Penelope'
'Ash' for 'Ashley'.
'Tash' or 'Tasha' for 'Natasha', 'Nata(s)cha' (a variant of Nathan/Nathaniel?)
'Toni', 'Tony', or 'Ton' for 'Antonia', 'Anton', or 'Antonius'.
Skimming through the quick examples I came up with, one thing stands out: if it ends with an 'a', feminine. I believe this stems from Latin? It also appears Brittany is a very British example, whereas say 'Tony' stems from a Catholic background. People with that background get very traditional names, but they're always practically shortened. Annoyingly, you'd have to mention your complete name on say a form, but otherwise you get a wider choice since you have like three names, and they're relatively long so more variety to pick from.
The '-sha' suffix is often used in short/informal versions of Russian names which might contribute to a lot of confusion since many people use the informal version of their name as formal overseas.
With the formal versions, the vowel rule is a good bet, but a lot of the informal versions for both male and female names end in 'sha' (and thus 'a').
Here's a few examples:
- Natalia: Natasha (Female)
- Aleksandr, Aleksandra: Sasha (Male/Female)
- Evgenii, Evgenia: Zhenya (Male/Female)
- Aleksei: Lyosha (Male)
- Daria: Dasha (Female)
- Oksana (Female)
- Nikita (Male)
- Yurii: Yura (Male)
- Pavel: Pasha (Male)
Keeping it terse here, the list goes on and on as you can come up with an 'a'-endng informal version of almost every male name.
Yes, it stems from Latin. See Latin's case declension tables [0]
In Spanish and Portugese, -a is a feminine suffix and -o is masculine; that's where we get Patricio vs Patricia.
There are very few female names that end with -o and very few male names that end with -a in Spanish.
Another example is -ine in Joseph/Josephine. -ine/-ino/-in is a feminizing suffix in German and a diminutive in Spanish and French, that's why it's a femenine suffix in names. In English we have hero vs heroine.
Chris, Kris, or Cris can be short for Christina, Kristina, Kristofer, Christopher, Kristian, Kristian, Christy, Krista, or Kristi. Sometimes you'll see Crys, Chris, Krys, Kris, or Cris for Crystal/Cristal/Chrystal/Krystal.
You'll also sometimes see Christopher shortened to Topher or to Kit.
> Gerry is also short for Gerald sometimes.
>
> Tony in the US is often short for Anthony.
These two are incredibly common in the UK. You will occasionally see Ant (as in And & Dec TV presenters) but almost no one uses Anthony, they are usually all Tonys.
The female short names is usually spelt Toni, but pronounced the same.
My classmate's older brother was named Ashley, and the story was that when he showed up at the state university he was assigned to a female dorm / floor.
IDK about the politician, but I bet 80% of the Lindsey’s out there are named after the Fleetwood Mac guitarist, so obviously that name transcend any petty gender limitations.
Lindsey (as well as Ashley, Tracy, Kelly, among others) are all, I believe, last names that became given names. They skewed female over time because they end with a vowel.
Ashley Williams is the name of two American actresses as well as two male soccer players (Welsh and Liberian) and a male boxer (also Welsh).
Ends in 'a' = female: a relatively safe assumption, as far as an assumption here can be safe, with no other context. A strong majority in many places will match that. Many of the exceptions will be obviously foreign names with traditional spelling, which can go either way (may follow that culture's patterns, may not, highly varied).
Ends in vowel (sound) = female: probably mostly true, in that I strongly suspect it's >50%, but it's unreliable enough that I'd avoid trying to base any assumptions off it.
Names really follow no rules at all here. For both good and bad. E.g. most recently I ran across a "La-sia" pronounced "ladashsia". If it's spelled vat-ik'Nff and pronounced "King George" and they're female, then that's what's correct.
I mostly agree, but for example Andrea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea is a masculine name in Italian and a feminine name in Spanish. Here in Argentina it's mostly feminine, but if someone has many Italian ancestors, it may be masculine.
> It is part of the Italian male names ending in a, some others being Elia (Elias), Enea (Aeneas), Luca (Lucas), Mattia (Matthias), Nicola (Nicholas), Tobia (Tobias).
Edit: "Here in Argentina it's mostly masculine" -> "feminine"
> Ends in 'a' = female: a relatively safe assumption, as far as an assumption here can be safe, with no other context. A strong majority in many places will match that.
Which places? I guess I ask because your next sentence:
> Many of the exceptions will be obviously foreign names with traditional spelling
Which makes me wonder if you meant "US places", because I can think of a few male names, which maybe categorised as "foreign" if you're in the US, that end in "a".
e.g. Csaba (pronounced "Chubba") is a reasonably common Hungarian name.
And some not so "foreign" ones, albeit mostly with Biblical roots, like Joshua and Ezra.
The names with Biblical roots did not end in -a in their original form, but in most cases their termination was "-ah". The final consonant was usually dropped in English, resulting in the "-a" termination.
Those names were longer in their original form, so none of them ended in "-a", but in English one or more letters were dropped, resulting in the "-a" termination.
E.g. Ezra was Esdras in Greek and in Hebrew it probably ended in "-ahu", while Elisha was Eliseus in Greek and in Hebrew it ended in ayin after the "-a-".
When I was a kid, I was very confused by the names of Fleetwood Mac band members. It really threw me for a loop that they had a Lindsay who is a dude, and a Stevie who is a girl, both counter to my intuition about names.
> Stevie is Stephanie which has always been very much a girl's name. Abbreviations have a tendency to collide.
Maybe, I guess. That would be one of those "abbreviations" like "Peggy" ("abbreviating" Margaret) that doesn't actually abbreviate the name, and you just have to know that someone out there thinks it's related.
"Stevie" for "Steven" follows the ordinary rules of English. For "Stephanie", you'd expect "Steffie".
Andrea, Simone, Nicola, Michele, Daniele in Italian are all male names, but English speakers would probably assume the person is female from the name alone.
True, good native and traditional cultutal exceptions of a rule of thumb. Speaking for myself (NL) we have a small amount of Italian names and heritage (also due to Catholicism), and say NYC would have much more Italian descendants.
Also, as someone who saw quite some football (non-US version), I ofcourse am familiar with a lot of names. For example, Andrea Pirlo. We also learn some via history at school, since Italy plays a prominent role in Europe's history. Regarding Nicola, people might be familiar with Nikola Tesla (the 'c' in this case, sounds like 'k') and it is just a variant of 'Nico', 'Nicole', 'Nicolas'. Then there's some dude at FIFA, 'Gianni' which is a variant of 'Jean', 'Jan', 'Jeanne', 'Janet', 'Jannie', 'Janine', etc. I could go on about Gianluigi Buffon...
What I just remind myself with regards to Italian is it tends to add a vowel at end of a word or name, but it often doesn't sound same in English or my native tongue (Dutch).
My name is Daniele (I'm from Italy), and I've been living in NY for a while. My real estate attorney name was Daniele as well (she's a woman,) it was extremely confusing at closing time.
Also, fun fact, I got invited to a ton Women in Tech stuff. I even got recruited to a company that was proud of having > 50% women in their teams. I assume that was because I was working on an OSS project (Chromium) and I had no avatar there.
Also, in the two FAANG companies I worked at I was added to women groups a few times.
> I don't know any women named Daniele or men named Danielle.
I wouldn’t be surprise to meet a (female) Daniele. The second L is already dropped somewhat regularly in Michelle. Which is interesting because it came from the French, but since then the French spelling drifted to "Michèle" (and then more or less fell completely out of fashion, and then seemed to come back for a while). In any case, both are pronounced exactly the same way.
> Andrea (on-dre-ah vs and-ree-ah) is a true name collision.
What do you mean? The Italian male name Andrea and the English female name Andrea aren't unrelated names that happen to be spelled the same way. They are one and the same name, both derived from the Greek word for "man"; the Italian name has managed to remember that it's overtly masculine and the English name has forgotten this.
They are only indirectly derived from the word "andros" = man.
They are directly derived from the feminine Greek word "andreia", meaning "courage" or "virility", which had been derived from "andros", as supposedly a quality typical for males.
It is the Italian name which has forgotten that originally it was a feminine word, not the English, which has preserved the original grammatical gender.
In Indo-European languages, most of the nouns denoting qualities have the feminine grammatical gender, so "andreia" is not an exception.
And virility literally means manliness or manhood, and by extension physical qualities ideally associated with men. Romans had another concept, virtue, for manly mental qualities. Ancient Greek "andreia" covered both aspects of manliness.
Andrea as a female name is similar to Carla or Caroline. Take a name that means something related to men (but no longer obviously so) and adjust it a bit to make it a female name. As a male name it just reflects changes in pronunciation over time.
> It is the Italian name which has forgotten that originally it was a feminine word, not the English, which has preserved the original grammatical gender.
That's not really what I said. The name is a masculine name. You can name your son "virility" without problems. If you try to do that to your daughter, you're going to have problems. The grammatical gender of the word is a separate concern.
Both are pretty rare now, but Danielle is the more common spelling. It also matches the way the -elle is used as a suffix in many diminutives (e.g., cervelle, ruelle, passerelle)
Is -elle still a living suffix in French? I was under the impression that -ette is the standard.
-elle is pretty clearly descended from one of the usual Latin diminutives (also visible in e.g. Spanish tortilla). -ette seems to come from a much rarer one?
-elle is not necessary a diminutive. In theophoric names such as "Arielle", "Michelle", "Michele", "Gabriella" and "Gabrielle" it is derived from the Hebrew El, a name for God.
Another commenter believes, in Romance languages, that the "-a" feminine gendered suffix is diminutive compared to "-o" masculine or neuter suffixes, but that is not true. Not for Latin, or Spanish or Italian or even Greek.
In general, English speakers seem not to be used to pronounce words that end with a non-silent letter e. Every time they pronounce my name (Daniele) like Danielle, I tell them it's Daniele (dah-NYEH-leh), and they go: dan-YELL, right? I tell them to say Daniel/Dani or anything that gets my attention. They seem to care more about the correct pronunciation of my name then I do, and then they botch it badly. :D
Many other Italian words that end with the letter E are changed to I, or mispronounced.
In the case of Elizabeth, it was likely just so common at one time that many variants were needed. Also Mary (you mightn't think there are many variants of Mary, but, for instance, Polly is a variant of Mary. Figure that one out.) At one time, pretty much every family in Ireland had at _least_ one child called Mary. Sometimes more than one. This ultimately resulted in Ireland having two consecutive presidents called Mary (and in the 2011 election, which lead to Ireland's first non-Mary president in 20 years, two of the candidates were also called Mary or variants thereof). The Marys have now largely aged out, and there were no candidates called Mary at all in the most recent election.
As someone with an pretty unusual name, I think kids will always find a reason to make fun of you and it isn't always just the name.
True Story: My mom was a 2nd grade teacher for 30 years and in the 70s had a student with very 'hippie" style parents. They named their son Log Cabin. You can imagine how that went over in elementary school.
Hilary is an interesting case because, in the data the article is looking at, there are only 5 total years where there were more M Hilarys than Fs: 1936-1941. And even in 1936 the M:F Ratio was only 28:9 (that's not a reduced fraction; the total count was 37). If it's true that Hilary was once a popular boys name, the evidence for that claim is not in the SSA data.
SSA data goes back to 1880, but it's incomplete before 1936 (only counting people who applied for social security after birth). Presumably that's why the article uses 1936 as their data cutoff.
I suspect this is a big driver of the switch. Parents that do not want to give their boys a name that will cause issues later on.
Back in school it wasn't a problem, people knew "Loren" was male, "Lauren" was female. Now, an awful lot of people don't. It's an uncommon enough name that even if you were around back when that's how it worked you very well might not have known it.
As an adult I routinely get misgendered, but it's a so-what to me.
As a non-native English speaker I've learned never to gender English speakers from their names. I mean in emails and so on, when I haven't had a chance to meet them. No "Ask Ashley if she would like to join us...". "Would Ashley like to join us?" is the safe option.
Loren adjacent. In high school my girlfriend was Lauren and mine is Lorin. Friends over pronounced our names to differentiate. It doesn’t bother me to get misgendered, either. It never lasts past hearing my voice or seeing me, though.
On the phone I'm routinely thought female even when they don't know my name. I'm not sure what's up, to me my voice on the phone sounds very different than in person but it doesn't seem female.
How "not long ago" are you thinking of? Clinton was first a major figure in the 90s (and we also had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fresh_Prince_of_Bel-Air ). And Clinton herself is from the baby boom generation; what male Hil(l)arys from that cohort do you have in mind?
Looks like it flipped in ~the 40s, by the ~60s had become rarer as a male name, and was pretty much a flop as a male name after the ~80s. So Clinton was born just when it started to take off for females (and in general - it was never as common as a male name) and there should have been in the same ballpark as as many male "Hilary"s of the same age.
It's kind of surprising that this is even allowed. A lot of countries require at least the first given name to match the gender. Some names might be deemed suitable for both genders.
Finland has some naming rules, but they don't necessarily apply to everyone in the country because they're rules for naming people born here, rather than those who later moved here.
There is a public index of forenames and surnames which I learned about when I was with my pregnant wife, and back then I was obsessively searching for my/our surname to see it increase by one when our newborn was registered and became "official".
Apparently within the whole of Finland there 22 men with the same surname as me, and 25 women. 21 of these people are in Finland and 26 are abroad but known.
Interestingly if I go to the forename search and look for people named "Steve" there are < 5 women with that name (i.e. non-zero, but the number masked for privacy reasons):
That sent me down a rabbit hole. Seems like having rules on what you can name your own kid are in place in several European countries. From an American perspective, I find this simultaneously off-putting (you are going to tell ME what I can name MY OWN child?!!) and also probably a net positive. I've often thought that a lot of tragedeighs could be averted if hospital registrars ran the names through a checker and pushed back on the parents to verify they really wanted that. But that's based on an assumption that it's often not intentional.
Except the kid is not YOUR OWN child, in the meaning of possession. You are the custodian to the child, not the owner. The child basically is owned by itself and you are (usually) allowed to take care of it and lead it on that way.
And there are tons of laws that forbid abusing childs. Like you can't hit them, shake them. In the USA they perhaps have a law that you can't put them in a microwave, I dunno.
And the laws in the european countries that forbid silly names are usually not restrict your "owners rights", but to protect the kid. In Germany, I mean, over here they forbid that people called their kid "Rumpelstilzchen", the name of an imp/goblin in a very well know fairy tale. If the parents would have come through I expect that the kid would have ridiculed in school and outside quite a lot. Other kids can be cruel ... and even the odd mindless adult.
Actual names that german parents wanted for their kids, but that weren't granted: Bierstübl, Borussia, Crazy Horse, Gastritis, Grammophon, Januar, Joghurt, Kirsche, Liebknecht, McDonald, Millenium, Möhre, Pfefferminze, Pilulla, Porsche, Rosenherz, Rumpelstilzchen, Satan, Schmitz, Schnucki, Schröder, Seerose, Sputnik, Störenfried, Rasputin, Verleihnix, Waldmeister, Whisky, Woodstock
Some have outright negative connotation (Satan, Störenfried, Rumpelstilzchen), others are just extremely uncommon and thus standing out. For example, in Germany we don't name girls about other things like Melody, Crystal, Daisy, Faith, Grace, Haven, Hazel, Amber, etc. So if you name your kid after a product or a thing, e.g. Porsche, Kirsche or Joghurt, then it will draw the wrath of the other kids onto itself.
And THAT is the reason the authorities don't allow a name. It's not about unusualness alone. A lot of unusual first names were the parents could show "Esenosarumensemwonken is a first name in Nigeria" go through.
Really? With the spelling Portia it's a perfectly respectable girl's name in English, why not in German? Or are they completely unrelated? The English Portia stems from Brutus' wife.
Surely it was the name of a person long before it was the name of a thing?
It is customary for anyone receiving Confirmation to choose a patron saint, but this name is not essential to the ceremony, and not usually added to one's legal or commonly-used names.
Men and women entering consecrated religious life often receive a religious name. Sometimes their surname is suppressed. Their new name may be chosen by their institute, community or their superior. It is not uncommon to see compound names, and opposite-gendered names in usage there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_(name) - It's not an exclusively female name. But in the US, you can give a kid pretty much any name you want (see the names Musk gives his kids these days).
I'm genuinely curious what your understanding of American culture is such that you find it surprising that Americans wouldn't tolerate government intervention in how they name their kids.
But Jean (English name, like Jeannie) and Jean (French form of John) are entirely different names, with different pronunciations, that happen to share the same spelling.
I am curious how you define "entirely different", because where I am looking, all the names you mention have parallel etymologies, the same origins, and similar meanings. We find them with different pronounciations and many spellings, because of the regional languages spoken, but they were adopted into a multitude of languages from the same sources. So how do you consider them "entirely different"?
This article misleads by presenting these transitions as from "popular boys name" to "popular girls name", when in fact most of the cases here are from "rare name, sometimes used for boys and sometimes girls" to "suddenly trendy for girls".
To take Ashley as an example. This name suddenly started ramping up in popularity in the 60s. In 1970, there were 927 girls named Ashley in the U.S. It peaked at 54,856 in 1987.
It became notably more popular for boys at roughly the same time! The peak of M Ashley was in 1980, at 746. (Note: it's also very likely that these numbers are wrong. The SSA data also has 56 male Marys in 1980, which is likely the result of coding error.)
Meanwhile, in 1945, solidly in the time period when the article would like you believe that Ashley was solidly a boys name, there were 57 M Ashleys and 10 F. 1950 was 55 M/15 F. Prior to 1960, a "good" year for Ashley was around 100 total babies, with some split of both M and F.
To me, a more honest interpretation of this data is that Ashley was a somewhat unisex, but mostly just very uncommon, name that suddenly became trendy in the 1960s, especially for girls but also for boys.
It did fall in popularity much faster for boys than girls, perhaps as it became to be perceived as feminine due to its popularity for girls. But note that even today, Ashley is still used as a boys name! There were 69 M Ashleys in 2009 and 27 M Ashleys in 2025 (by which point the prevalence of coding error is much lower -- M Mary has fallen out of the data set entirely).
The 2025 F:M ratio of 1829:27 is pretty high, so it's fair to say that Ashley would now read as feminine to many Americans (but note, still less so than Mary). It's much less clear to me that you can conclude from the 1945 M:F ratio of 55:10 that it was once a boys name.
Edit: I noticed that the "How we measured it" notes at the bottom mention this shape for Ashley. But I want to note that it's not unique to that name. Dana, another well-known example of "girls name that used to be a boys name" is very similar. Suddenly trendy in the 40s for both boys AND girls, relatively unisex and uncommon for both prior to that, with usage for boys dropping off relatively quickly as girls' usage continued to rise.
Likewise for Lindsay -- suddenly trendy (this time just for girls) in the 70s. Before then, fairly unisex. 1950 has F:M ratio of 116:97.
This sounded dubious to me, for Ashley in particular. In my genealogy research, it is a common name for men in the southern USA in the mid to late 19th century, and names used to be much more regionally bound. So I checked - I'm seeing about 60k Ashleys in the 1870 Tennessee census, out of 1.2 million people. That is about 5%, higher than Ashley ever got nationally as a girl name at its peak later. But over half of those are labeled female! 35k vs. 25k! Not sure about the data quality in my searches (I am not checking the familysearch transcriptions on tens of thousands of census record scans) but well, I was surprised so I thought I would share.
It is certainly possible that Ashley was once a popular boy name. The point is that, contra the article, there is no evidence for this in the SSA data they have based their analysis on.
I think a lot of these cases would be hard to answer definitively just because we don't really have accurate data more than a century back. And the fact that lots of people will repeat the claim "Ashley used to be a boys name" can be equally well explained by the fact that parents had to say something when their sons asked why they gave them a girl name, and they didn't have the data either.
What is true is that people who named their sons Ashley or Dana or Lindsay, at the time, most likely did not perceive those names as feminine.
My "This" above was vague/ambiguous, sorry. Yes, I only meant, it seemed dubious to me that Ashley wasn't a predominantly boy name, in those times and places where it was actually common prior to the girl peak. (Which was not substantiated by the only data I checked of course.) Your actual substantive points make full sense, cheers.
Also there is a male character named Ashley in Gone with the Wind, which was extremely popular since book release in 1936 and movie in 1939.
You would think there should be a lot of boys named Ashley in the 50s and 60s.
Came here to say the same. Anyone doing data visualization should think long and hard before using something beside a line or bar chart. Almost everything else is worse in multiple ways.
While I've never met anyone named Jody, it was a common nickname decades past in the US Army for the guy who your girl is cheating with while you're deployed. I'm surprised to see it was considered a female name in the time I would have expected it to be more definitely male, given that context.
Looking it up, it appears that the original name was "Joe" rather than "Jody", so maybe that's the distinction in the early 20th.
A name I was surprised by was someone I know naming their daughter Miles/Myles, which is such a male name in my mind. It might even be based on the Latin word for soldier. It's not one I've seen used for a girl anywhere else, yet.
I'm obviously a biased source, but I metaphorically keep the Vorkosigan books [0] in a similar place with the (more-famous) Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. Both are fun reads to return to which I also find very quotable. (Although one is space-opera and the other is satirical-fantasy.)
Interestingly, the first few books are about Miles' parents, but it's neat to see what the most popular character does/doesn't inherit.
Interesting, I guess my two favourite SF/F writers are Pratchett and Iain M. Banks (who also wrote basically space opera) (my favourite kind of opera).
I'll have to check out the Vorkosigan books. I used to read a lot more and older Sci-Fi but I started finding it repetitive and samey.
Not sure if they person you know is a millennial, but I have noticed of this (my) generation that they love not only gender-ambiguous names, but to name girls with decidedly male-coded names.
>> From Old French given name Milo, of problematic origin, possibly from an unknown Germanic element, or a short form of Slavic names beginning with mil- "grace, favor". The English form is associated by folk etymology with Latin mīles ("soldier").
It would be nice to know that the Old French name didn't secretly happen to match the hypothetical Old French form of the Latin word for soldier. I sadly don't personally know how to check what form miles, militis would have taken in Old French.
A good heuristic, though, is that if the French name had come from this very common Latin word, someone would have already thought of that (as has in fact happened many times) and it would have been thoroughly investigated. The evidence in support must be somewhere between "wafer-thin" and "robustly contradicted by the known sound changes from Latin to French".
Only somewhat related but my parents named me a fairly common, if niche in America, name. But they declared it to be pronounced like another common name. For example, naming me Joan but having it pronounced Jane. They claimed that it was some Old World way to pronounce it that they found in a book.
I grew up not thinking about it much (it's my name). I think it even helped me socially a bit when I was younger...it was a pretty good conversation starter. Now that I'm middle-aged, it's an annoying thing I have to state at the start of meetings.
I've since grown tired of correcting everyone and now a lot of people go around calling me Joan, and no one knows who they're talking about anymore :)
for people from languages that mark gender with an ending (romance languages for instance), putting the "wrong" ending something like a noun would sound odd or change the meaning
Interestingly if I remember correctly they have different origins, Maria is a biblical name, while Mario comes from Latin (which can decline Marius to Maria, but that’s a different word)
It has been my experience as a long-time worker with youth groups that the recent trend for gen-alpha girls names is to bring back Victorian-era names (Blanche, Pearl, Gertrude, etc) and for boys new names have been coined indicating testosterone or aggression (Trucker, Hunter, Killer, Fleshrenderer -- okay, maybe I made that last one up). One year every boy in my youth group seemed to be named Jaxon or Finnigan though.
There's definitely a new gendered name dichotomy going on. We'll have to wait a few years before these trends start showing up in the census data though.
You don't need to wait that long. Data from 2025 is already available. Hunter isn't in the top 100, and Trucker and Killer (lol) aren't in the top 1000. Those are two exceptionally weird and unfortunate names.
Liam and Mateo aside, the top 20 could have been pulled from 1840. Tradition still reigns, and Victorian-era names for boys are the rule rather than the exception.
Liam, the #1, is rather weird -- kind of modern and pan-ethnic -- and there are a lot of low-class-coded names like Ronin, Odin, Cash, Royal, etc. These tend to be confusing headscratchers more than they are aggressive, though.
Names that end with -er are in general quite rare. That said, it's true that Archer is in the top 100, and Gunner is somewhere around #500.
In the US, I think the most reliable source for name trends is the Social Security Administration [0], not the US Census. Relevant because they summarize baby names every year, so you don’t have to wait.
It's the same in Spanish-speaking countries: "José María", "Luis María", etc. And the other way around too, women name "María José". Regarding the last one, there are many women named "María <X>" who go around by their second name "<X>", as María is way too common.
In Belgium too. But it came from the habit of making the second and third name the name of the godparents, combined with so many women being named Maria. And yes, godparents are a Christian thing.
I'm French and my son's name is Camille. It was exclusively a masculine name until the 19th century (Camille Pissarro, Camille Desmoulins, etc.) then gradually became feminine. By the 80s and 90s, it was overwhelmingly used for girls, but now it's pretty evenly split again, with boys starting to slightly outnumber girls.
What i find fascinating is that i don't really like Camille as a girl's name but i love it for a boy! It conjures up completely different images in my mind.
There are many other popular unisex names in France right now: Charlie, Sacha, Lou,...
This reminds of of this tool [1]. It's a wasm that shows "overrepresented baby names". Choose a state, choose a time frame, it will tell you which names were given more in that state compared to all other states. Ever heard of an "Alaska Name" or an "Idaho Name"... find them with this tool.
Most interesting thing that stands out to me is the number of names that appear to be what I would consider an abbreviation of a more traditional name.
e.g. “Pat” is cited, but doesn’t specify whether that refers to Patricia or Patrick.
Surnames are gendered in some languages, typically when they're defined as gendered adjectives.
In Polish '...ski' is masculine and '...ska' is feminine. The prefix stays the same, so a brother and sister have slightly different surnames. (Like 'Wolski' vs 'Wolska.')
In the US some immigrants forgot this, so you get American women with a '...ski' surname.
I don’t think it’s only that, but in many Western European societies (and those derived thereof) it would have been unusual to have members of a family with surnames spelled differently, even if only the suffix.
So the whole family may just have taken the male head of house’s surname to avoid problems, or even been simply assigned his surname by immigration officials.
Many a name were changed at Ellis Island, for example.
Those aren't family names but rather patronyms or matronyms (respectively); they directly translate to "son/daughter of Ivan". As I understand though, matronyms are often based on the name of the person's mother, so Ivanova wouldn't be a common name.
That said, I don't speak Russian and have only a passing familiarity with the construction of Russian names, so don't take this as gospel.
GP is correct. Ivanov or Ivanova would generally be surnames, whereas Ivanov or Ivanov[n]a would be patronyms. In Russian culture, they generally don't use matronyms. And yes, it is indeed common in Russia to refer to individuals whom you are not close with using their surname, similar to Japanese culture.
Only ever heard of matronym use as a joke or very archaic.
Referring with surname only is a hierarchy assertion thing, and somewhat rude - boss would talk down to subordinate like that, or teacher to student.
When talking "up" or "sideways", or "down" but without a desire to assert superiority a name+patronymic is usually used, which reflects a respectful distance while not slipping into rudeness or overt familiarity. Sadly, it is mostly disappearing and giving way to Western "name-only".
And then, to emphasize familiarity, some groups adopt way of referring to each other by patronymic only :)
In high school, we referred to our teachers by honorific and surname, and we were also addressed by surname, even by our peers.
When I rewatched the Harry Potter film series this year, I began paying attention to how Harry was addressed. Draco Malfoy called him "Potter". So did many teachers: "Mr Potter". He who must not be named called him "Harry" and many epithets like "the boy who lived". Hagrid and Professor Dumbledore, at least in private, called him "Harry" all the time.
This is especially interesting, because "Potter" is a homophone with the Latin Pater, meaning "Father".
In the old days Johnson might've meant literally "son of John" but no longer. All of the people with the surname "Ivanov(a)" on that page also have a patronym, which in the West would be considered a middle name.
They did not necessarily forget the rule, it’s just inconvenience, especially when dealing with official business, when you have to explain why (for example) your kid’s last name is slightly different than yours.
You'd think so, but Allison is firmly in the girls camp today, at least in the US (Liverpool FC's male goalkeeper Alisson Becker is Brazilian). Madison is also more associated with girls.
My sisters both have last-name first names that are commonly used for both genders, and one of those sisters has 3 kids, all with last-name first names. It's weird, but it beats everyone having a biblical name.
I don't know why but the very specific episodes of when he buys a convertible and when he gets his friend to break his video game addiction still live rent free in my head. I can't remember anything else about the series.
Parker Lewis came out during my blunder Years, he was a role model. He was that kid just a few years older who had it all figured out. I buttoned my shirts to the adam's apple like Parker Lewis. I styled my hair like him.
I am not sure what to make of this, but the names there are ones that sound very American to me.
However the most popular names in the US are not that different from those in the UK, with few of the girls' names sounding American or unusual: https://namedaisy.com/blog/us-vs-uk-top-100-baby-names-2025 and not that many of the boys'.
Surprised Madison isn't on there as a boy name that became a girl name. It was a traditionally male surname (eg Madison, Wisconsin, the state capital, was named after James Madison) until the 1984 movie Splash, where a woman has to make up a name, looks around, sees a street sign for Madison Avenue, and says her name is "Madison". That was understood to be a joke at the time, akin to someone calling themselves Broadway, but because of that movie it quickly became a popular female given name. Personally when I was choosing my name, it came down to between Madison and Madeline, and the traditional masculine association of the former tilted me towards choosing the latter
Funny how this is country specific. Some of these would still be very unusual to have changed in the U.K… Ashley in particular, I’ve seen it as a girl’s name but only rarely here.
Depending on whether we model the data linearly or exponentially (like the famous Tohoku University study that found everyone in Japan will be named Sato by 2531)...
The US may reach the 100% Boy Name Ronin-ification anywhere between 2057 or 10,327 AD.
The shift that seems the weirdest to me is "Anne" shifting from a male name to a female name. This happened long before the US was formed, but it always surprises me when I read about a renaissance soldier named Anne.
As the Wikipedia article for Anne de Montmorency explains, he was named after his godmother. Anne has always been a predominantly female name, all the way back to its progenitor St. Anna.
In a rural area I visit frequently there is a couple in their 70s who run their own greenhouse selling flowers. One goes by Gene/Jean/Jeanne, and the other is Fran and I always get them mixed up because the names can be used interchangeably for either sex.
As someone who doesn't have kids yet and so doesn't meet a lot of new borns I found the names on this super surprising. Our intuition around names is almsot exclusively formed by our own age group and people older than us. For many of this it was shocking to me that within my lifetime (I'm under 30) names had gone from almost exclusively male to exclusively female. I guess this is why you end up with so many parents all choosing the same small set of names each believing they are choosing a unique name because they've never met an adult with that name.
I was asked once how I felt about the fact that the name I chose for my daughter was primarily used (in America) by Asian immigrants. I noted that they had this impression only because they grew up at the nadir of the name's popularity. It's much more popular now (still not top 50) which means that by the time my daughter is grown up, it will have lost that association, to whatever extent it briefly obtained.
This is also what happened to all those male Ashleys in the 70s. People picked up on the name's trendiness, but didn't initially realize it was vastly more popular for girls and would soon be seen as feminine.
Wonderful little bit of data analysis. I appreciate that the data visualisations let us see the answer from just a scan, no reading required (except the legend to make sense of the colours).
Tangent: I assumed this was a clever piece of marketing for an underlying company, but looks like 'NameDaisy' is purely a personal project (as opposed to a business).
I’d be curious if men with female names get rejected out of a lot of job interviews since the employer may have thought they chose a female for DEI and then a man shows up?
Or maybe it’s a good way to get your foot in the door in todays job market.
This was exactly my thought as well. The "Pat" skits showed up right around 1990 [1], were very popular, and didn't exactly paint "Pat" in a nice light. I wouldn't be surprised if would-be parents saw those skits and began actively avoiding the name.
I was very much shocked to see a feminine version of my name used IIRC on Dead Or Alive 4 (DOA4), not knowing the backstory: I think it was a character called Leon was promising to avenge his dead girlfriend, Rolande.
I've wondered if the women that have carried the name have liked it? In my mind, it's always sounded very blunt so as to be feminine, but I recognize I'm heavily biased when it comes to my own name.
Would be interesting to see if this happens in other cultures/other regions of the world.
Would also be interesting to see why these shifts ever occurred in the first place and why there's a greater move "towards girls" for most of the names.
I'm sure that in itself would be full of revelations
Such a thing will often happen as the result of a celebrity having the name. For instance, famed Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks, whose real name was Stephanie.
Years ago, one of the broadcasters for a Red Sox game was doing some ad read about some event Stevie Nicks was going to be at, but they read her name as "Steve Nicks" instead. Someone else in the booth corrected them, and they responded "I know him well, and I call him Steve". A fan apparently sent them a giant poster of Stevie Nicks, and the others put it up in the booth and teased him about it relentlessly during the next game.
Interestingly enough, Lindsey, like Lindsey Buckingham, the guitarist of Fleetwood Mac, became a more popular girl's name during Fleetwood Mac's heyday.
As somebody born with the name Steven I'm curious about the relative popularity of "Steven" vs. "Stephen".
I feel like when I was a child more people were present with a PH, but nowadas virtually nobody. Most of the Stephens I know are "old", and I think "Steve" won.
But no doubt it varies on country, and who you know.
(I legally changed my name from Steven to Steve, a couple of years ago, because it was the only name I'd ever used and it got too tiresome dealing with my official passport, and ID saying one name when I signed/wrote another name on all my official paperwork. To the extent that employers would book flights in one name but my passport was in the other name, cue much hilarity at boarding time..)
My brother was born in 1984 is Stephen. We have only ever called him by that name, Steve never stuck. At the time I thought Steven was the more common spelling already; but we were catholic and he was named for St. Stephen.
I mean, this is US-centric data, but it is probably a shortening of 'Stephanie' or 'Stefanie' [1], the female variant of 'Stephan' or 'Stefan'. It stems from Greek, apparently: Stephanos. Its variant are used entirely throughout Europe, from Portugal to Russia.
I find it interesting that many names I grew up associating to a gender can be genderless, these examples are usually girl names in Mexico: Yuri, Carmen, Karen
I guess it's eternally stuck in the 90s. I didn't see Perl in a long time now. 10-15 years ago it was still everywhere.
edit: No, it's stuck in the 80s: "The data comes from a 5% sampling of Social Security card applications with dates of birth from January 1980 through December 1989"
> It is a good idea to apply for your child's Social Security number and birth certificate at birth. If you apply at the hospital, the state agency that issues birth certificates will share your child's information with us. Then, we will mail the Social Security card to you. If you wait to apply, there may be delays while we verify your child's birth certificate.
The name has definitely become more ambiguous over time. I was born with this name, and I decided to keep it when I transitioned, as I met many trans women that picked this name for themselves.
I can't imagine this is very common, most transgender people seem to pick a new name.
However, "Skyler" is a 1980s respelling of a much earlier Dutch name that was used nearly exclusively for boys, spelled "Schuyler". Allegedly, it dates back to the 1600s.
It's super hard to keep track of, I have an app that's designed to help couples name their baby, and I always wanted to stay away from hard-defined gender stuff, but people still want boy/girl categories. So many are both, but to varying degrees. I ended up using a boy/girl/unisex selector, and had Jev tag all the names. It's especially when dealing with other countries, languages, and customs. At the end of the day, it's mostly easier for the user to just swipe left on a name rather than try to pre-eliminate it from their pool.
Except it didn't "flip" until 2004. It was also was never really a boys name. In 1990 there were 30 M Aryas and 6 Fs. Prior to 1982 it doesn't occur at all in the SSA data. The very first year that there were more than 100 Aryas total (2002), there were 54 Fs and 79 Ms.
This is kind of gibberish without seeing the name frequency alongside the swing. It's much more likely to see a swing with an infrequent name than a common one.
To my Irish ear, these are two completely different names, not even slightly similar. (They're also etymologically unrelated.) It blew my mind when discussions on r/namenerds revealed that many Americans consider these names similar or even identical.
For most of my (male) life, people misspelled my name Aaron as Erin fairly regularly. I think that has contributed to the confusion. I also used to get Arron, Airon, and other variants. The "A-A-Ron" skit has made a noticeable difference in recent years.
In the past there were no hard associations between sexes and gender and it was possible to find boys wearing some pink clothing, but it was never the case that people associated pink with boys and blue with girls.
There are some limited examples that contribute to the misunderstanding. For example blue is often associated with the Virgin Mary and red (not pink) was considered a manly color often worn by warriors (e.g. the British, the Romans, etc).
---
This is essentially the way reporting works. If you write an article showing that in the past it wouldn't have been bizarre for boys to wear pink you don't get much traction. But if you write how pink was actually worn by boys and it was considered shocking for girls to wear it, then people find that very surprising and you get a lot of views (truth be damned).
It’s easy to confirm that what you’re saying is not so. Ask AI and you'll get specific citations of pink being recommended for boys in the early 20th century: “in the early 1900s, publication guides and trade journals—such as the June 1918 issue of Earnshaw's Infants' Department—recommended pink for boys and blue for girls.”
Thanks for that link, which confirms xdennis's post above is correct. A few lines from that article, emphasis mine:
> blue’s connection with boys and pink’s with girls wasn’t solidified until the mid-20th century... the gendered nature of the colors was either reversed or at best inconsistent (Paoletti’s original argument, which has since been misconstrued as a total reversal).
> ...5 million books published in the U.S. between 1880 and 1980, he found many examples of the standard “blue for boys” and “pink for girls” association, but virtually none for the reverse... “remarkable consistency in gender coding over time” rather than a sharp shift around the 1940s, leading him to conclude that the magazine excerpts often cited as proof of the reversal were anomalies.
> ...follow-up analysis... published between 1881 and 1930... recorded 34 instances of the standard color coding and 28 instances of the reverse... “Pink-blue gender coding showed a certain degree of inconsistency (though not a reversal)... “However, the true extent of that inconsistency is still unclear, as different kinds of sources return dramatically different pictures.”
@ternaryoperator: perhaps that's a good example of AI not being real-world-helpful, if you did ask it for "specific citations of pink being recommended for boys", because that sounds like it was asked to cherry-pick, and did.
In English, maybe. Several other languages have gendered nouns, so names are not interchangeable. For example "Ιωάννης" in Greek is the male form of "John" given exclusively to male children, whereas "Ιωάννα" is the female form given exclusively to female children. No exceptions. AFAIU if a person wished to change their name from "Ιωάννης" to "Ιωάννα" they would have to go to court and change their birth gender also.
Legal systems and language are a social construct. Your example doesn’t really disprove the assertion. (I’m not sure how these data promote the hypothesis either.)
I'm not sure what you mean by "natural" coloring, but the association you're describing has also reversed over time; i.e., pink was considered masculine and blue was considered feminine.
I suppose I just find it odd that you’re recommending a gendered approach to color (which is fluid, depending on time or country) on a post that is highlighting how our perception of gender (when it comes to names) is fluid.
The link doesn't support your claim. There is no evidence of a reversal, and the original researcher most subsequent authors cited apparently never suggested there was, only that it was inconsistently applied.
I have heard and I do believe that there are countries that use other colors for babies, but wouldn't trust wikipedia nor its selective sources on any topic like gender; wikipedia is no longer enslaved to the truth.
You absolutely should trust wikipedia unless you can provide some evidence to the contrary; in fact, the linked article even has a whole section to support your doubt about the claim*('s veracity), which was interesting to read!
> In a 2017 letter to Archives of Sexual Behavior, researcher Marco Del Giudice commented on earlier claims about a supposed shift in pink–blue color associations or preferences sometime around the 1940s, from pink for boys and blue for girls before that period, to the opposite alignment afterward. He summarized his earlier work from 2012 which found "no evidence of either reversed or inconsistent usage prior to the 1940s".[41] Del Giudice called this theory the "Pink–blue reversal" (PBR), and said it was "usually attributed to [Jo] Paoletti", and quoted from five academic articles that reprised the theory of "pink is for boys" prior to the 1940s. However, he found upon analysis that it was exceptionally difficult to actually document such a shift, and exclaimed upon "the thinness of the evidence presented in support of the PBR".[42]
> In his 2012 paper, Del Giudice quoted from four articles published in academic journals which all echoed the claims about PBR theory, many relying on Paoletti, including Chiu et al., 2006: "Prior to that decade, Paoletti ... noted that the sex-dimorphic color coding of pink and blue was inverted, i.e., infant boys were dressed in pink and infant girls were dressed in blue";[43] Frassanito & Pettorini (2008): "At one point, pink was considered more of a boy's color ... blue was considered more for girls";[44] Cohen (2013): "the current stereotypical American assignment of pink to girls and blue to boys was reversed a century ago";[45] and Zucker (2005): "Yet, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, there is evidence that the gender-dimorphic nature of these two colors was inverted, that is, blue was judged to be stereotypically feminine whereas pink was judged to be stereotypically masculine."[46][47] But Paoletti never made the claim that pink and blue reversed, only that there was inconsistent usage that took until the 1950s to resolve[42] starting from the first appearances of gendered pink and blue color associations around the 1860s.[7]
tl;dr - gender is very clearly a social construct and we shouldn't get hung up on colors or names
>gender is very clearly a social construct and we shouldn't get hung up on colors or names
Why? Is there some reason we shouldn't get "hung up" about social constructs? Can you argue a reason for this without reference to other social constructs?
i asked you first and you didn't answer what I asked, so why should I do what you ask? I am prepared to refute your point, but we need to stick to the agenda as set down.
> Of the 42 names that moved toward girls, 34 were driven mainly by an increase among girls, rather than a decline among boys.
> Surprisingly, the same pattern held in the opposite direction. Of the 12 names that moved toward boys, 9 shifted mainly because fewer girls were receiving them, rather than because more boys were. In other words, whichever way a name moved, the biggest change usually came from girls.
This is consistent with the observation that girl's names are more dynamic.
I have no data but feel that boys tend to get the family names and biblical names (in US anyways). It's rare to hear of a girl named Elizabeth III or Mary Junior but quite common for those concepts in boys. So I think the boy names are heavily weighted on probably the most popular ~25 or so names. Since girl names are more free to follow whatever is fashionable at the time, trends move faster.
My son is named after his grandfather, and it's an overly common name in English (American and British). Definitely a top 3 most common for last several centuries
I thought girls didn't use junior, III, etc. because traditionally girls adopt their husband's last name, so they would no longer have the same full name as their mother.
I hadn’t thought about that but makes me wonder if it will become more common since not taking your husbands name has become more common. I wouldn’t think so, but I’m pushing 50 and can’t think of ever meeting a female named after her mom so if it shows up at all in the data that would be interesting.
Funny enough, I think it’s common for the female middle name to be a mom/grandma/aunt name.
My guess is no, because carrying the family legacy is falling out of fashion as much as taking the husband's name, maybe even more so.
Family legacy is quite obsolete in modern society.
Not every society wants to be modern.
Modern society cuts family ties which is a lot of times not so great, but on the other hand it saves lots of people from abusive relationships.
Once you can leave abusive parents or siblings, whole world of opportunities opens. Then again on the other hand not everyone can deal with such a freedom.
Yet still I am personally supportive of modern approaches where people can choose their destiny and not being tied to a family legacy.
At least in France, it means the father leaves and the kid doesn't have enough money to study — and we're transitioning to the workplace providing the funding for studies (apprenticeships where the company pays 10k€ per year, empoverishing the worker).
I'd rather see the name of the father be stuck to the kid so if he's a failure, everyone knows who failed him.
We will probably find out very soon why humans organized the way they did for millennia before we decided to change everything.
Please don't vaguepost on hn. It's hard to guess if this is an attack or a defense of the nuclear family (us other commenters would have to guess if you know how recent that phenomenon is).
Therefore, you just invite confusing answers and useless discussions in your reply.
To me, it's very clear GP was writing in support of traditional values, of which nuclear family is one.
Please don't gatekeep hn posts. Comments with little interests will receive little replies and others will rise. You adding a reply helps the post you dislike rise over others.
The idea of surnames is an anthropologically recent tradition. Humans living in small communities had no practical need for multiple names. Surnames mostly arise in societies with relatively strong centralized states so that the government has an easier time tracking its citizens (census-taking, tax collecting, etc.).
The idea of being named after your father (or your husband for that matter) is much older than surnames. Don't know exactly how old, because written history is only available for strong centralized states, but at least biblical times.
Yes, but the context of this thread is about taking your father's surname specifically. Even "modern societies" where wives might have the option to not take their husband's surname aren't moving away from naming sons after their fathers, as far as their given name goes.
I meant the "John son of Jack" thing. It was extremely common for thousands of years across pretty much every European culture, and Jews (likely other people too but IDK). Eventually it transformed into surnames by Jackson. The important part is that surnames didn't introduce the idea of father's name being part of your name even if you're not named after him. This was already widely practiced, surnames just streamlined the process and made ancestry more trackable (though some countries still use the old rules to this day. Spain I think, and Iceland maybe?)
Dunno about other cultures, but in Poland it was very common until relatively recently to refer to wives/daughters by a suffixed first name (not surname) of the husband/father. If Mary Higgins married Jack Smith, from then on she'd be known as Jackowa, and their daughter Betty would be called Jackówna. This is distinct from naming children after their ancestors. The custom predates surnames by hundreds of years, but served essentially the same role of tying the women to their men.
That is a bit cliché isn't it? According to INSEE in France 12% of the kids were in shared custody and that is the mean. At 10 y old it is around 15%. And around 24% of the fathers get full custody.
So while there is a bias towards mother custody of the kids (around 2/3), there is still 1/3 of the kids where it is not the case.
Also, not having full custody of kids doesn't mean the father is leaving completely from the kids life. More often than not the kids need to stay with one parent because job and cost of living forces them to be more regionally apart (only 37% of kids living in same town). That doesn't mean the father do not see the kids in the weekends/holidays nor contribute financially to study.
So the reality is way more nuanced than you make it out to be in a small comment.
Why not have him take the Maiden name so everyone can know the mother who failed him?
Why do you frame it as only fathers can fail children? Or only men can do wrong? Women can pay for studies as well, and have just as much duty to their children.
But then if a child succeeds despite whatever failure his father was he is stuck with that looser name.
Doesn't everyone do that? My brother has a grandparents name as his middle. I never thought of it as a gendered tradition
Is it a specific cultural thing I wonder
All the men on my dad's side of the family have the same middle name, with just a different first name.
It's apparently not an uncommon tradition in several areas of the world to either have either the first or middle name be shared, and then a unique name for the unmatched one (e.g. John Alan Doe, John James Doe, John Matthew Doe - Alan John Doe, James John Doe, Matthew John Doe).
Eastern Europe of the Slavic variety enters the chat with a concept of patronymics. Nobody asks you if you want to have a middle name, it's always a deriative of your father's, by law.
My son was born in a country with doesn't write those in a birth certificate. When we went back, guess what -- they still added it by deriving it from my name.
My children have no middle name, and neither did I or my brother.
Possibly. I’ve just heard it more with girls and wouldn’t expect it’s evenly common on relative basis but certainly could be wrong
> I have no data but feel that boys tend to get the family names and biblical names (in US anyways).
Curiously, in the last few months in the U.S. I've met a Tamar and an Esther, both women given family names that were drawn from the bible.
Not uncommon Jewish names.
Certainly Esther is reasonably common in the U.S., but when I saw her name I was expecting someone about 60 years older.
There is a small trend of using very old names like this, not necessarily biblical but just old sounding. We know an elementary aged girl named Lydia and I always think the last person I knew by that name was my great-great grandmother.
Is this regional? I’m the west coast, I never run into Jrs or 3rds.
Anecdata: I’m a guy and a III. My son almost was a IV but we chose another first name and used my (and my dad’s and my grandfather’s) name for his middle name. My great grandfather had a different name, but I think his dad and maybe grandfather had the same name as me.
Not to offend, but I think it has declined because this naming of Jr, III, and so on has come to be associated with poor or rural people. For what it’s worth, I have a relative who is a IV
Never heard that framing before. In New England the practice is associated with blue-blood wealth.
This appears not to have been rigorously studied. Anecdotally, the further west one goes in America the higher the likelihood a suffix indicates low SES.
Well it’s likely the adoption by the Latinx. I think that demo grows as you move west. In Texas it’s become more common in that demo and the redneck whites. The monied still have it but more commonly go towards super preppy names like Tripp, Shep, Archer, Preston. A common theme I see if you dig deeper is they name one of the boys the mom’s maiden surname. But in general, surnames as first names is very common in this demo. I mostly exist in this demo of WASPs and my wife has I think 4+ cousins named in the mom maiden name format, I didn’t realize it was a bigger thing until we had kids and learned a lot of our friends had also done this (I thought maybe just unique to my wife’s family, but bigger trend). My family wasn’t monied so I wasn’t really exposed to it until adulthood.
Sorry to bring up race but it’s the US and the SES is too highly correlated to ignore these in a data conversation and we all do things slightly differently roughly by race/background, there’s no monoculture in the US
Eh, in my experience it’s all over the place. Scottsdale’s suffixes are largely not Latin. Instead, it probably indicates someone who sells real estate or crypto.
In texas I feel like more than half the Juniors I've met are latin
Fun part is that no one can stop poor people from imitating rich ones, so they do. Then rich ones start coming up with other ways to show to the others that they’re rich and poor copy over and over again.
I guess latest wave would be “Techno Mechanicus” or whatever the other silly names we heard lately.
I used rich as shorthand placeholder of blue blood, noble, famous and rich. Not everyone who is rich is noble and noble doesn’t mean they are rich.
There have historically been a lot of ways poor people were stopped from imitating rich ones, and not just the obvious ones involving spending money. The US is pretty enlightened in that there are no name protection laws that I know of. In many European countries, you still need permission from every carrier of a rare last name if you want to take it.
There have historically been also ways where poor stopped rich from being rich and having fancy name was making one a target.
Yes. Like that William H Gates III from Seattle.
coming from europe: in my experience "fancy names" are either blue blood wealth OR regular people wanting to look like blue blood wealth. So I feel you both have a point here.
"Junior" might be associated with poor or rural people, but "III" and "IV" can only convey the absolute maximum level of pompousness.
(There was a brief period where my sister was dating someone who went by J.T. The initials were something of an effort to obscure his name, James III.)
Or 3 James was confusing so they probably had a James, a Jim, a JT. No attempt to obscure just trying to yell at a specific person when the trash needs to be taken out.
I know a lot of people that just go by their middle names in this scenario. Even my brother was named like this and the intent from the beginning was he’d go by his middle name.
I think maximum pompousness goes to those that make sure you know they’re a third or fourth. If I meet you at a cocktail party and will never meet you again, don’t introduce yourself as William H Gates the Third, just say Bill.
I've known two people in my life who went by some version of Trey as a nickname, as in some slight change if tres, three.
I’d agree the trend is waning if that’s what you’re getting at but I think it is baked into the history of this dataset and is also still significantly more common for boys than girls
Also, IV is really quite rare for boys too. Junior still super common.
Why would anyone make their kids legal name include “Junior”.
How does that work when they’re 60 with grandkids?
I have Junior in my legal name - it's the bane of my existence when it comes to legal forms because of how inconsistent various systems handle it, even for different government systems. This became especially true after 9/11 and the Patriot Act pushed these systems to update and go digital because they couldn't get their act together to coordinate for years.
Ferenc Puskás the Hungarian footballer had grown up with the nickname Öcsi, meaning little brother. Later when he got old he was referred to as Puskás Öcsi bácsi, meaning Uncle Little Brother Puskás...
Yeah, it's a bit weird...
On some forms in the US, it's listed as a suffix. Some agencies enforce it, others do not (SSA does not, for example). And colloquially, when"Senior" dies, the son often stops using "Junior" (though that's not a legal change).
UK, Can, and AUS are similar, but not exactly the same as the US. And NSW in AUS complicates matters by outright prohibiting roman numberals are Jnr/Snr suffixes. Mexico has more restrictions due to the mothers-last-name, fathers-last-name naming convention.
Personally, I dig the Nordic and Arabic "x, son of y, son of z, son of..." patterns.
The UK doesn't really use those kind of suffix at all unless you're the king, so I'd imagine it would be quite hard with forms.
How the heck can one state of Australia prohibit certain types of names? Doesn't that cause all kinds of problems with documentation mismatches if someone moves?
Dunno, but Iceland also enforces it's son-of/daughter-of naming convention to the point some names are explicitly prohibited (or is it explicitly allowed, I forget if it's a black-list or white-list).
Yes, but that is on a country level, it doesn't vary internally. So it would only be an issue for immigration.
They don’t change names when they move. The names are registered in the location of birth.
But your name might get mangled in some states if it doesn’t fit, same as it might in the US if some system doesn’t properly handle, e.g., multiple middle names or special punctuation.
It's not unusual for someone to change their name when immigrating. Have you met anyone in your presumably English-speaking country who wrote their name in Korean characters? Probably not because they convert it to the nearest allowed name.
>Have you met anyone in your presumably English-speaking country who wrote their name in Korean characters? Probably not because they convert it to the nearest allowed name.
Having a list of "allowed" names implies another list of "disallowed" names. I am not aware (including names with non 7-bit ASCII characters) of any such list of names that aren't legally allowed to be used.
I'd note that the artist formerly known as Ƭ̵̬̊ legally changed their name to that symbol here in my "presumably English-speaking" country.
I am not aware of any such restrictions where I live. Perhaps it's just where you do?
Sure, but moving states is a lot more common than moving countries.
> the Nordic
Long obsolete except in Iceland.
Not so long. My grandfather, born 1908 in Norway, kept the proper patronym as a middle name since he would otherwise have the same full name as his father. Everyone had to take fixed last names by 1923, but it wasn't uncommon to keep the patronym as a middle name like my grandfather did.
Off topic, but this makes me realize one of my grandfathers was born in the 1890s, which is possibly getting rare. Time passes swiftly by. This very day your life is shorter by one and all that.
I won’t forgot when my small child clarified that I was born in 19 something not 18 something, two equally remote times to him.
On the list my middle name was listed as a name going from male to female - I think the first time I have seen anything about this name out in print in public.
Not actively used, but still see the occasional ...son on a surname.
(Brit here)
My first and middle names are John and Richard. A couple of times on trips to the US people have read my initials as 'Jr'. Very surprising the first time! Has never happened to me in the UK.
The Sopranos had a main cast Junior, who was also the oldest of the team. Just for some anecdata
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junior_Soprano
And it's not even part of his legal name.
> How does that work when they’re 60 with grandkids?
They get called "grandpa" like everyone else with grandchildren.
they become Jay-Are
> I have no data but feel that boys tend to get the family names and biblical names (in US anyways).
Or both: the family names having been chosen originally from biblical names, but not continuing for that reason.
I'm a David, and there were many Davids in my University intake year, but I suspect that has less to do with the Bible and more to do with mothers of a certain age range having interests in the Davids Bowie or Essex (or both! - quite possible in my mother's case).
There was quite a famous Elizabeth II.
She didn't get the suffix until her 20s. And it was not used to distinguish her from her mother (who was also a Queen Elizabeth) but from yet another Elizabeth who lived centuries earlier.
Elizabeth II was the first Elizabeth who was Queen of UK
Same with the current king Charles III of England. He is the first of that name to be king of the UK (and Canada, Australia, etc). Maybe people should revert to multiple ordinals, like James VI and I in 1603.
I don't think that's right - well, Canada and Australia ofc. The "U" in "UK" refers to James IV of Scotland becoming James of England, thus uniting the states of Albion. Charles succeeded him.
Scotland and England were not united into a single Kingdom of Great Britain until 1707 (under Queen Anne), and it did not become the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Ireland) until 1800 (under George III). So technically the "U" actually refers to union of Britain and Ireland, not England and Scotland.
Before the Acts of Union of 1707, England and Scotland were not united into one kingdom, but two kingdoms that shared the same king under a personal union.
It seems there are lots of cases across the board where "women adopt traditionally male thing" has become the norm in this timeframe but not many where "men adopt traditionally female thing" at quite the same rate or scale.
I think there's something to this, but also you've got to think about the cultural standards where "female" is considered "abnormal".
e.g. you have "toys" and "girl toys". "clothes" and "girl clothes" and such. It's not everywhere or everything but there is a trend.
Yeah, a woman wearing pants to an office job became totally normal. A man wearing a dress or skirt would be assumed to be transitioning gender or wearing a costume.
Women used to be arrested for wearing pants many places, and still kept doing it until it was normal and legal. I don’t think straight men had the same motivation to push for the right to wear skirts; if they did that would be normal too.
Straight men wear "kilts" or "sarongs". If you think either is not entirely and unarguably straight and male I would invite you to repeat your views in certain places....
I live in a place in North America where it is not uncommon to see men in kilts. Still, you can safely assume that anyone you encounter in such attire is attending a formal function or cultural event. While it may be gendered as masculine, it is not a norm for everyday dress.
Sure. But I would similarly invite you to go up to a straight Scottish male in traditional attire and ask if they are wearing a skirt :)
That is one of the places I had in mind. Maybe Glasgow?
Or a dhoti if it’s hot out.
Women in Paris were only legally allowed to wear pants in 2013.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-21329269
There are lots of ridiculous unenforced laws like that; it doesn't tell you much.
There sure are. I wish there was some clause though that any law not used in a court of law for say 30 years, has to be actively renewed to not expire. From time to time, malicious actors try to abuse such laws.
I like that idea because it'd take a lot of teeth out of "this won't hold up in court but we can still harass you with it" type laws.
When I put on makeup I wear a suit. /halloween
Quite rare, but there is the occasional Scotts-descendant who wears a kilt to work --on occasion--. They are not skirts but they are similar in the way that a blouse is not a shirt but is very similar.
Lots of actual Scots where kilts for formal occasions. The current King of Scots sometimes does too.
Which really reveals how far we still have to go as a society when trivial things such as the above are taboo.
[flagged]
Or bag piper
And then we have skincare products and wellness.
> also you've got to think about
We really don’t.
And shouldn’t.
close one, you almost had to think about something there.
That is the pattern. Rarely would you have a baby boy using a women's name. Broadly speaking there is a general stigma within society going the other direction then women adopting male things.
Marion Morrison was a definitive male role model.
What was his stage name again? John Wayne… point stands
Is he related to Marilyn Manson or Alice Cooper?
Distantly. The all wore makeup at work.
The simple explanation is that parents don't want to give their sons gender-ambiguous names, but are more open to it for daughters. This is consistent with all of the dynamics described in the article.
Why that is the case is another question.
A baby does not "adopt" their name, though. It is given to them.
Not sure if this is universal, but when my wife and I were thinking about naming our son, we observed that in Spain there seems to be much more variety of girl than boy names.
In fact, you can almost prove it by bijective mapping to a subset. Almost all typical boy names have a feminine version (Juan->Juana, Carlos->Carla/Carlota, Manuel->Manuela, Adrián->Adriana, and so on... there are some exceptions, but not many) while the opposite is not true, there are plenty of common girl names without masculine version (Laura, Marta, Elena, Carmen, Sara, and many others).
There are also papers doing the actual stats and concluding that girl names are more diverse. No idea what the reason is.
Same here in Denmark. There are currently 28,054 approved girl names, 22,607 approved boy names, and 1,581 approved unisex names.
Comrade Adam is keeping an eye on the lists and is posting highlights whenever new names are approved: https://kammeratadam.dk/keyword/godkendtefornavne
"Billiee"
A name that really begs to be screamed out loud
> approved
What? The state gets to choose which name can you freely give your child?
That’s completely normal in many countries, Germany for example doesn’t let you pick offensive or clearly-bad names for the child. You can’t call your kid Hässlich (Ugly) for example. You can also not use X12-Whatever-Allowed-In-US.
But apart from that, there’s no list, you can invent names.
Yes, but a veto over an offensive name is different from choose-only-from-allowlist.
https://www.personregistrering.dk/hc/en-gb/articles/36002148...:
“If the first name you want for your child is not on the list of approved names, you can apply to have it approved. You do this when you complete the application, where you are asked to explain why you want a non-approved first name.”
I think that’s a bit clearer than getting a veto, as vetos without a whitelist can get applied inconsistently.
Some European states do that, or place restrictions.
In here, for example, the name needs approval to not be harmful to the kid, nor degrading, nor diminutive form of name can be used. Also typos are checked for.
Yes of course you can't name your child Shit Head. Is that a thing your government will print on a birth certificate?
If you give it some thought, it becomes obvious that since any name is used in many public settings, society/state has a legitimate case to prevent offensive naming. That is different from state literally creating an allowlist. The huge middleground is benign names that are in no way offensive but still require you to get an approval from the state. I think this is an overreach, ymmv
In order to lighten the administrative burden that occurs when society/state has a legitimate case to prevent offensive naming, society is likely to create an approve list.
Denmark did use to have "These and only these names" and they were written into the law (yes, there are pages and pages of Danish legislation that are just names), but now any non-offensive name is okay, and for administrative purposes, an "approved"-list is kept for easy reference to things that have already been, well, approved.
I don't think that's unusual. In my country there isn't a fixed official list, but the law says you need to use an actual name (it can be a foreign one). If it seems too crazy it might be denied.
People here find it very strange (insane even) that in US you can name your child Apple, North West or X Æ A-Xii.
(I don't have a strong personal opinion on this.)
Pretty common, the state of California also prevented someone from naming their child "X Æ A-12".
In Iceland, yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Naming_Committee
Absolutely. For example, you can’t name your kid “dipshit” for obvious reasons.
Yep, came to a similar conclusion for other countries too. Together with the fact that a lot of boy's names either feel old or overused, you don't really have the variety of names you get for girls.
Girls get flowers, gemstones, places, etc. while boys get old grandpa names.
> No idea what the reason is.
In many western cultures [1] it was (still is, but to a much lesser degree) customary for boy's (especially for the eldest) names to be hereditary. This gives natural tendency for the set of "traditional" boy names to be self reinforcing: remain more closed and maintain relative relevance. There are simply less boys to play with naming.
On top of that, it was common for the eldest son to inherit the estate and produce more offspring, while the younger were much more likely to be enlisted and as a result suffer from early-adulthood mortality. This further reinforces the traditional names.
I wonder how these statistics would look like if it was possible to control for these effects. Maybe look at variety of names among fallen soldiers versus the general population with some time lag?
> Almost all typical boy names have a feminine version
If I were to warrant a guess, I would say this is to quite a large degree an effect of the first-born being a girl and getting a feminized version of the hereditary name.
[1]: https://xkcd.com/285/
Laura becomes Lauro
Lauro is really rare, though. There are 259 in Spain, in comparison to over 259K Lauras. So it's not a name that most people would consider.
I was thinking about this in terms of products recently. Gendered products tend to move from men to women, but rarely the other way around. High heels, Chuck Taylors, motorcycles, etc.
Some products do move the other way but it is a slow process: massages, wet wipes (Dude Wipes anyone?), manicures, etc. But I think a good majority of products marketed to women have a much harder time crossing over.
I get the sense that most of the “needlessly gendered” products out there are attempts to make products permissible for men.
>Some products do move the other way but it is a slow process: massages, wet wipes (Dude Wipes anyone?), manicures, etc. But I think a good majority of products marketed to women have a much harder time crossing over.
Marlboro cigarettes[0] come to mind.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlboro
Names, appearance, gender-related behavior is generally more fluid for females in America currently.
A different somewhat topic-related comment: I have a friend named Darakshan -- he took up his Sufi name (his birth name was David). Darakshan is generally considered a female name in Persian-Urdu culture -- I don't know whether he and his American Sufi friends who gave him that name were aware of that ... not that it matters; it does suit him. ("Bright," "shining," "radiant," "brilliant," or "luminous")
> This is consistent with the observation that girl's names are more dynamic.
Interesting, I wonder what causes this? In the US, is more common to name the first son after the father. Given this data comes from US social security information, that definitely has an impact.
> girl's names are more dynamic
The linguist in me can't decide if girl names are more dynamic (there are more options) or less dynamic (they don't get used for boys as often).
> the same pattern held in the opposite direction.
That seems like a really awkward way to describe the observation.
Wouldn’t the “same” pattern be if the increase was due to greater uptake in the opposite sex.
There are a few names I think are being confused. Jan, short for Janice is a female name, but Jan in Central / Eastern Europe as a form of John is masculine. Jean the female name and Jean the french male name are different.
Yeah immigration and mix of similar names from different languages could also be reasons for the (at least perceived) shifts.
This is part of what they mean by girl names driving the shift. You have a traditional ethnic name that may be masculine or feminine and has a baseline low level of popularity. Then you have a popular female name that rapidly gains and loses its popularity. The effect on the mix is that it's shifting from masculine to feminine, but really you should look at it as a newly-popular female name being layered on top of the traditional name. And you can often see this in the timescale, with a clear pop-culture trigger leading to the rising girl name.
Looking at just part of the data, I can see this with Arya (Stark, Game of Thrones), Paris (Hilton), Stevie (Nicks, of Fleetwood Mac), Dakota (Fanning), and Tatum (O'neal), and the masculine trend also relates to the fading of generationally-popular names like Jean (Silent/Boomer), Pat (Boomer), Joan (Silent/Boomer), Courtney (Gen-X/Xennial), etc.
I was actually surprised to see Trinity in the list. Not only does it remind me of The Matrix (1999), I also don't think I've ever encountered someone with that as a real name.
Don't forget Madison[1] (Splash[2]). My guess is that the majority of names prior to 1984 are clerical errors where the surname was entered as the given name.
1: https://namedaisy.com/us/name/Madison
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splash_(film)
I was going to say the same about Jean; I think that one at least is hard to really draw conclusions from without additional data like languages spoken at home.
Anecdotally, the boy->girl names are almost all very popular names where I've met multiple each of those across different ages, whereas the other two categories feel like they have a lot more down-list entries.
Gender change with the same pronunciation would be a difficult to compile but interesting refinement.
I knew a Jan who was actually named January, and she was the only one I've ever met with that name.
At various times over the years I have had access to long lists of real names, membership lists for different orgs, that sort of thing, and one thing that stands out is that the real variety of names exceeds what I expected. So many weird and funny names. I love looking thru the lists; even movie credits are long enough to have some gems in them. People, perhaps especially during pregnancy, have some very idiosyncratic thoughts.
Kim is another good one - I've met several Korean men named Kim.
Though I'm not 100% sure they weren't using their family name as their everyday identity name (the Kims I met were not related).
Kim Jong Un, right :)
Very likely it's their family name. Kim is the most common family name in Korea. Most Korean given names are two characters (=2 syllables) and more difficult to pronounce and memorize for westerners. And because of the space inserted between two romanized syllables (Jong Un), they are often misunderstood as middle + given names.
The current Kim's dad didn't help here giving his son a name that's so similar to his own.
Kim is the name of the protagonist of one of the most popular boys' novels of all time, and there are a number of examples of well known male Kims from the twentieth century.
In Britain we had the very famous MI6 Intelligence office Kim Philby who was also a Russian spy, he was a key part of the Cambridge Five spy ring.
What I didn't know until just now is Kim was just a nickname. He was Harold Adrian Russell Philby and apparently Nicknamed "Kim" after the boy-spy in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim[2] which surely foreshadowed his career!!
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24803131
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Philby
Kim is also a shortened form of Joachim.
Australia: Kim was a common male name
Kim actually is usually a family name, but it's written first.
Going by the peak time on the chart, Jean flipped over fast right about when Jean-Luc entered public consciousness.
I think that's an example of what he's talking about. Jean-Luc is pronounced "John Luke" whereas the feminine form is Gene. And similarly the male Jan is pronounced Yan.
Probably more in the US. In the UK John and Jean (with a french pronunciation) sound completely different. John has a hard O sound, and Jean has a soft J and an elongated aw sound
I am not a native English or French speaker but the way I've heard Luke being said in UK/US English and the way I have heard the filmmaker's name pronounced that Luc doesn't really sound like Luke. I feel the u and c are shorter and subdued.
Yeah and Jean is pronounced more like 'Jawn' but I just mean it's a clearly male name in either case, as opposed to Jean pronounced 'Gene' which is generally a female name, though oddly 'Gene' also pronounced the same is generally a male name.
> John Luke
that's not how I would pronounce by default, though I suppose I might if star trek TNG wasn't a thing.
My biggest WTF on this (as a foreigner) was the late Lindsey Graham. I always knew Lindsey/Lindsay as a female name.
Either way, peeking through the list, seems to me names which end with a vowel are usually feminine. However, there's a caveat: names end up shortened, and over time even those get shortened.
'Brit', 'Britney' for 'Brittany'.
'Gerry' or 'Geri' or 'Ger' for 'Gareth' (Dutch variant: 'Gerrit'),
'Pat', 'Patty' for 'Patrick', 'Patricia'.
'Pen', 'Penny' for 'Penelope'
'Ash' for 'Ashley'.
'Tash' or 'Tasha' for 'Natasha', 'Nata(s)cha' (a variant of Nathan/Nathaniel?)
'Toni', 'Tony', or 'Ton' for 'Antonia', 'Anton', or 'Antonius'.
Skimming through the quick examples I came up with, one thing stands out: if it ends with an 'a', feminine. I believe this stems from Latin? It also appears Brittany is a very British example, whereas say 'Tony' stems from a Catholic background. People with that background get very traditional names, but they're always practically shortened. Annoyingly, you'd have to mention your complete name on say a form, but otherwise you get a wider choice since you have like three names, and they're relatively long so more variety to pick from.
The '-sha' suffix is often used in short/informal versions of Russian names which might contribute to a lot of confusion since many people use the informal version of their name as formal overseas.
With the formal versions, the vowel rule is a good bet, but a lot of the informal versions for both male and female names end in 'sha' (and thus 'a').
Here's a few examples:
- Natalia: Natasha (Female)
- Aleksandr, Aleksandra: Sasha (Male/Female)
- Evgenii, Evgenia: Zhenya (Male/Female)
- Aleksei: Lyosha (Male)
- Daria: Dasha (Female)
- Oksana (Female)
- Nikita (Male)
- Yurii: Yura (Male)
- Pavel: Pasha (Male)
Keeping it terse here, the list goes on and on as you can come up with an 'a'-endng informal version of almost every male name.
Yes, it stems from Latin. See Latin's case declension tables [0]
In Spanish and Portugese, -a is a feminine suffix and -o is masculine; that's where we get Patricio vs Patricia.
There are very few female names that end with -o and very few male names that end with -a in Spanish.
Another example is -ine in Joseph/Josephine. -ine/-ino/-in is a feminizing suffix in German and a diminutive in Spanish and French, that's why it's a femenine suffix in names. In English we have hero vs heroine.
[0]: https://dcc.dickinson.edu/grammar/latin/case-endings-five-de...
There are a few common Italian male names end in -a, though.
Andrea, Luca, Nicola are the most common.
Aren't most of these cases of dropping the final s and maybe a vowel from a latin names instead of adding a diminutive a?
Andreas Lucas Nicolas, etc. (perhaps with different spelling in Latin)
> Aren't most of these cases of dropping the final s
Yes, but also because those names were originally Greek.
[dead]
All masculine names in Italian that end with -a come from Jews, old testament, with the exceptions of Enea and Nicola.
All three examples in GP are ancient Greek origin.
Andrea.
He's talking about Spanish, not Italian, a different language?
Lots of nicknames in Spanish end with an A though, Juanma and Joserra, basically putting together Juan Manuel and Jose Ramon.
Gerry is also short for Gerald sometimes.
Tony in the US is often short for Anthony.
Chris, Kris, or Cris can be short for Christina, Kristina, Kristofer, Christopher, Kristian, Kristian, Christy, Krista, or Kristi. Sometimes you'll see Crys, Chris, Krys, Kris, or Cris for Crystal/Cristal/Chrystal/Krystal.
You'll also sometimes see Christopher shortened to Topher or to Kit.
> Gerry is also short for Gerald sometimes. > > Tony in the US is often short for Anthony.
These two are incredibly common in the UK. You will occasionally see Ant (as in And & Dec TV presenters) but almost no one uses Anthony, they are usually all Tonys.
The female short names is usually spelt Toni, but pronounced the same.
Great examples! My initial post is far too limited. It fascinates me, though, like etymology does, too.
'Antony' is also related to 'Antonius' (as is 'Italian Antonio').
One weird one (for me) from English is 'William' -> 'Bill' since there's no 'B' in 'William', and no 'W' in 'Bill'. I wonder what's happening there.
Also the G in William is silent.
Medieval rhyming stuff. Robert -> Rob. Richard -> Dick. Edward -> Ned.
Tony is also common in the UK. Anton in parts of South Asia.
Chris can be short for Christian.
I feel like you were getting dangerously close to tragedeigh there.
There was a boy in high school named Ash (he was probably class of 2002). He tried hard to not let anyone know it was short for Ashley.
My classmate's older brother was named Ashley, and the story was that when he showed up at the state university he was assigned to a female dorm / floor.
I’m guessing he decidedly didn’t change it as fast as he possibly could.
And I'm a guy named Ashley who hates being called Ash. Takes all kinds.
Their parents were probably fans of American writer Margaret Mitchell's most famous novel.
I met this Australian actor in person once: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Zukerman
Ash is a robot.
Ash is a pokemon trainer. (I watched Alien and still had to search up your comment)
IDK about the politician, but I bet 80% of the Lindsey’s out there are named after the Fleetwood Mac guitarist, so obviously that name transcend any petty gender limitations.
Also all the Stevies in the same generation.
The one that always trips me up is when a man is a Stacey.
Growing up in the rural midwest, I had no idea Tracy could be a dude's name until I worked with one. (Great guy, btw.)
I learned who Tracy Morgan was from Tracy Jordan on 30 Rock. Only Tracy I know of, male or female, so it always felt masculine to me.
Tracy W. Bush, composer and sound designer for Warcraft <3
When I was younger, there was a couple of somewhat-distant relation who would show up occasionally to family events.
Their names were Kim, and Pinky. Kim was the wife and Pinky was the husband.
For me - men named Tracey
I had to call a customer once whose name was Courtney and it tripped me up when it turned out to be a male..
Ambiguous couple names are always a challenge. I indirectly know of a Tony and Dawn. Or is it Toni and Don? I can never remember which is which.
Knock three times on the ceiling if you want to find out.
Lindsey (as well as Ashley, Tracy, Kelly, among others) are all, I believe, last names that became given names. They skewed female over time because they end with a vowel.
Ashley Williams is the name of two American actresses as well as two male soccer players (Welsh and Liberian) and a male boxer (also Welsh).
Don’t forget Ashley Joanna Williams
Ends in 'a' = female: a relatively safe assumption, as far as an assumption here can be safe, with no other context. A strong majority in many places will match that. Many of the exceptions will be obviously foreign names with traditional spelling, which can go either way (may follow that culture's patterns, may not, highly varied).
Ends in vowel (sound) = female: probably mostly true, in that I strongly suspect it's >50%, but it's unreliable enough that I'd avoid trying to base any assumptions off it.
Names really follow no rules at all here. For both good and bad. E.g. most recently I ran across a "La-sia" pronounced "ladashsia". If it's spelled vat-ik'Nff and pronounced "King George" and they're female, then that's what's correct.
I mostly agree, but for example Andrea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea is a masculine name in Italian and a feminine name in Spanish. Here in Argentina it's mostly feminine, but if someone has many Italian ancestors, it may be masculine.
> It is part of the Italian male names ending in a, some others being Elia (Elias), Enea (Aeneas), Luca (Lucas), Mattia (Matthias), Nicola (Nicholas), Tobia (Tobias).
Edit: "Here in Argentina it's mostly masculine" -> "feminine"
The masculine/feminine question of the name Andrea is made weirder by the fact it literally derives from the Greek word for ‘adult male’ (andros)
More likely it is not derived directly from "andros", but from the feminine noun "andreia", which means courage or virility.
So the original grammatical gender was feminine, hence the -a termination.
> Ends in 'a' = female: a relatively safe assumption, as far as an assumption here can be safe, with no other context. A strong majority in many places will match that.
Which places? I guess I ask because your next sentence:
> Many of the exceptions will be obviously foreign names with traditional spelling
Which makes me wonder if you meant "US places", because I can think of a few male names, which maybe categorised as "foreign" if you're in the US, that end in "a".
e.g. Csaba (pronounced "Chubba") is a reasonably common Hungarian name.
And some not so "foreign" ones, albeit mostly with Biblical roots, like Joshua and Ezra.
Given this is a thread on a post about US names, in reply to a foreigner remarking on the difficulty of names in the US:
Yes, I was referring to places in the USA.
The names with Biblical roots did not end in -a in their original form, but in most cases their termination was "-ah". The final consonant was usually dropped in English, resulting in the "-a" termination.
Indo european languages mostly, probably
> Many of the exceptions will be obviously foreign names with traditional spelling, which can go either way
Or the names of biblical prophets like Ezra or Elisha. Not very popular today but you can find a lot of them in 19th century records.
Those names were longer in their original form, so none of them ended in "-a", but in English one or more letters were dropped, resulting in the "-a" termination.
E.g. Ezra was Esdras in Greek and in Hebrew it probably ended in "-ahu", while Elisha was Eliseus in Greek and in Hebrew it ended in ayin after the "-a-".
I've actually run across more female "Ezra"s than male, but broadly yes agreed.
See https://www.reddit.com r/tragedies for all sorts of, uhh, inventive spellings and names.
When I was a kid, I was very confused by the names of Fleetwood Mac band members. It really threw me for a loop that they had a Lindsay who is a dude, and a Stevie who is a girl, both counter to my intuition about names.
Stevie is Stephanie which has always been very much a girl's name. Abbreviations have a tendency to collide.
> Stevie is Stephanie which has always been very much a girl's name. Abbreviations have a tendency to collide.
Maybe, I guess. That would be one of those "abbreviations" like "Peggy" ("abbreviating" Margaret) that doesn't actually abbreviate the name, and you just have to know that someone out there thinks it's related.
"Stevie" for "Steven" follows the ordinary rules of English. For "Stephanie", you'd expect "Steffie".
-a became the most common final letter for girls names in the U.S. only in 1936! Before that, it was -e.
Andrea, Simone, Nicola, Michele, Daniele in Italian are all male names, but English speakers would probably assume the person is female from the name alone.
True, good native and traditional cultutal exceptions of a rule of thumb. Speaking for myself (NL) we have a small amount of Italian names and heritage (also due to Catholicism), and say NYC would have much more Italian descendants.
Also, as someone who saw quite some football (non-US version), I ofcourse am familiar with a lot of names. For example, Andrea Pirlo. We also learn some via history at school, since Italy plays a prominent role in Europe's history. Regarding Nicola, people might be familiar with Nikola Tesla (the 'c' in this case, sounds like 'k') and it is just a variant of 'Nico', 'Nicole', 'Nicolas'. Then there's some dude at FIFA, 'Gianni' which is a variant of 'Jean', 'Jan', 'Jeanne', 'Janet', 'Jannie', 'Janine', etc. I could go on about Gianluigi Buffon...
What I just remind myself with regards to Italian is it tends to add a vowel at end of a word or name, but it often doesn't sound same in English or my native tongue (Dutch).
Andrea (on-dre-ah vs and-ree-ah) is a true name collision.
Michele and Daniele look like misspellings of Michelle and Danielle though. I don't know any women named Daniele or men named Danielle.
My name is Daniele (I'm from Italy), and I've been living in NY for a while. My real estate attorney name was Daniele as well (she's a woman,) it was extremely confusing at closing time.
Also, fun fact, I got invited to a ton Women in Tech stuff. I even got recruited to a company that was proud of having > 50% women in their teams. I assume that was because I was working on an OSS project (Chromium) and I had no avatar there.
Also, in the two FAANG companies I worked at I was added to women groups a few times.
> I don't know any women named Daniele or men named Danielle.
I wouldn’t be surprise to meet a (female) Daniele. The second L is already dropped somewhat regularly in Michelle. Which is interesting because it came from the French, but since then the French spelling drifted to "Michèle" (and then more or less fell completely out of fashion, and then seemed to come back for a while). In any case, both are pronounced exactly the same way.
"Andrea" is at its origin a feminine Greek word, but because its meaning is "courage" or "virility", in many places it became a name given to males.
> Andrea (on-dre-ah vs and-ree-ah) is a true name collision.
What do you mean? The Italian male name Andrea and the English female name Andrea aren't unrelated names that happen to be spelled the same way. They are one and the same name, both derived from the Greek word for "man"; the Italian name has managed to remember that it's overtly masculine and the English name has forgotten this.
They are only indirectly derived from the word "andros" = man.
They are directly derived from the feminine Greek word "andreia", meaning "courage" or "virility", which had been derived from "andros", as supposedly a quality typical for males.
It is the Italian name which has forgotten that originally it was a feminine word, not the English, which has preserved the original grammatical gender.
In Indo-European languages, most of the nouns denoting qualities have the feminine grammatical gender, so "andreia" is not an exception.
And virility literally means manliness or manhood, and by extension physical qualities ideally associated with men. Romans had another concept, virtue, for manly mental qualities. Ancient Greek "andreia" covered both aspects of manliness.
Andrea as a female name is similar to Carla or Caroline. Take a name that means something related to men (but no longer obviously so) and adjust it a bit to make it a female name. As a male name it just reflects changes in pronunciation over time.
> It is the Italian name which has forgotten that originally it was a feminine word, not the English, which has preserved the original grammatical gender.
That's not really what I said. The name is a masculine name. You can name your son "virility" without problems. If you try to do that to your daughter, you're going to have problems. The grammatical gender of the word is a separate concern.
I mean that you can look at Daniele or Danielle and guess if it's an Italian guy or an American girl. You can't do the same for Andrea.
Danièle is the French spelling of the female name. It should have an accent, but in the US those get dropped regularly.
Both are pretty rare now, but Danielle is the more common spelling. It also matches the way the -elle is used as a suffix in many diminutives (e.g., cervelle, ruelle, passerelle)
Is -elle still a living suffix in French? I was under the impression that -ette is the standard.
-elle is pretty clearly descended from one of the usual Latin diminutives (also visible in e.g. Spanish tortilla). -ette seems to come from a much rarer one?
There's a fun map on Spanish wikipedia of which diminutive forms are preferred in which parts of Spain: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo:Diminutivos_del_espa%C...
> Is -elle still a living suffix in French? I was under the impression that -ette is the standard.
Yes, both are used commonly. In names, there are Isabelle, Gabrielle, Cyrielle, Annabelle, Axelle, and many others. I am not sure there is any rule.
-elle is not necessary a diminutive. In theophoric names such as "Arielle", "Michelle", "Michele", "Gabriella" and "Gabrielle" it is derived from the Hebrew El, a name for God.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabrielle_(given_name)
Another commenter believes, in Romance languages, that the "-a" feminine gendered suffix is diminutive compared to "-o" masculine or neuter suffixes, but that is not true. Not for Latin, or Spanish or Italian or even Greek.
In general, English speakers seem not to be used to pronounce words that end with a non-silent letter e. Every time they pronounce my name (Daniele) like Danielle, I tell them it's Daniele (dah-NYEH-leh), and they go: dan-YELL, right? I tell them to say Daniel/Dani or anything that gets my attention. They seem to care more about the correct pronunciation of my name then I do, and then they botch it badly. :D
Many other Italian words that end with the letter E are changed to I, or mispronounced.
Around here, all of these would be male with the last vowel removed and female with it.
Yes, I would assume those are feminine names.
The closest English male names to your examples are Andre/Andrew, Simon, Nicholas/Nick, Michael/Mike, Daniel/Dan. Gianni is John, etc
Gotta mention Lindsey Buckingham.
(Way underrated)
In a similar vein, the way women's names get shortened into a plethora of variants never ceases to surprise me
Elizabeth
Eliza, Liz, Liza, Lisa, Beth, Betty
In the case of Elizabeth, it was likely just so common at one time that many variants were needed. Also Mary (you mightn't think there are many variants of Mary, but, for instance, Polly is a variant of Mary. Figure that one out.) At one time, pretty much every family in Ireland had at _least_ one child called Mary. Sometimes more than one. This ultimately resulted in Ireland having two consecutive presidents called Mary (and in the 2011 election, which lead to Ireland's first non-Mary president in 20 years, two of the candidates were also called Mary or variants thereof). The Marys have now largely aged out, and there were no candidates called Mary at all in the most recent election.
And as memorialized in a movie and TV series, Buffy.
and Bess
> Skimming through the quick examples I came up with, one thing stands out: if it ends with an 'a', feminine. I believe this stems from Latin?
My own name, Joshua, goes against this rule. I don't think it's Latin though.
There was a guy at my school named Hilary who got awful abuse for it. Always wondered why parents would do such a thing to a child.
Did he have a brother named Sue? If so, I might know the reason ...
> And he said, "Son, this world is rough
> And if a man's gonna make it, he's gotta be tough
> And I knew I wouldn't be there to help ya along.
> So I give ya that name and I said goodbye
> I knew you'd have to get tough or die
> And it's the name that helped to make you strong."
Johnny Cash - A Boy Named Sue
Lyrics by Shel Silverstein [0]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Boy_Named_Sue
As someone with an pretty unusual name, I think kids will always find a reason to make fun of you and it isn't always just the name.
True Story: My mom was a 2nd grade teacher for 30 years and in the 70s had a student with very 'hippie" style parents. They named their son Log Cabin. You can imagine how that went over in elementary school.
Hilary is a boys name that became a girls name. It is also a surname (although the latter usually has a double L).
Hilary is an interesting case because, in the data the article is looking at, there are only 5 total years where there were more M Hilarys than Fs: 1936-1941. And even in 1936 the M:F Ratio was only 28:9 (that's not a reduced fraction; the total count was 37). If it's true that Hilary was once a popular boys name, the evidence for that claim is not in the SSA data.
I think that data only goes back to 1936? its too recent.
It may also have been more popular in the UK than the US.
SSA data goes back to 1880, but it's incomplete before 1936 (only counting people who applied for social security after birth). Presumably that's why the article uses 1936 as their data cutoff.
I suspect this is a big driver of the switch. Parents that do not want to give their boys a name that will cause issues later on.
Back in school it wasn't a problem, people knew "Loren" was male, "Lauren" was female. Now, an awful lot of people don't. It's an uncommon enough name that even if you were around back when that's how it worked you very well might not have known it.
As an adult I routinely get misgendered, but it's a so-what to me.
As a non-native English speaker I've learned never to gender English speakers from their names. I mean in emails and so on, when I haven't had a chance to meet them. No "Ask Ashley if she would like to join us...". "Would Ashley like to join us?" is the safe option.
Here's my favorite "Lauren"*: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Bush
*solely because her legal, married name is Lauren Bush Lauren. She actually changed it, which is gold (and honestly very sweet).
> As an adult I routinely get misgendered, but it's a so-what to me.
You're fortunate that the spelling is distinct. The story of Kim O'Grady is depressing.
https://www.thecut.com/2013/07/maybe-you-should-add-mister-t...
Loren adjacent. In high school my girlfriend was Lauren and mine is Lorin. Friends over pronounced our names to differentiate. It doesn’t bother me to get misgendered, either. It never lasts past hearing my voice or seeing me, though.
On the phone I'm routinely thought female even when they don't know my name. I'm not sure what's up, to me my voice on the phone sounds very different than in person but it doesn't seem female.
I went to school with someone named Loren. She was female, and the name didn't rhyme with Lauren; it was stressed on the final syllable.
Would just say "my name is Hill"
Because it's there...
Weird comment, given that it was, not long ago, a common name for a male.
I'd wager if it weren't for Clinton, most people would still associate it with men.
How "not long ago" are you thinking of? Clinton was first a major figure in the 90s (and we also had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fresh_Prince_of_Bel-Air ). And Clinton herself is from the baby boom generation; what male Hil(l)arys from that cohort do you have in mind?
Looks like it flipped in ~the 40s, by the ~60s had become rarer as a male name, and was pretty much a flop as a male name after the ~80s. So Clinton was born just when it started to take off for females (and in general - it was never as common as a male name) and there should have been in the same ballpark as as many male "Hilary"s of the same age.
https://namedaisy.com/us/name/Hilary
The male number does go to zero the year that Clinton became first lady.
Hilary Putnam (famous male philosopher) was born in 1926. I imagine soon after this generation is flipped.
It's kind of surprising that this is even allowed. A lot of countries require at least the first given name to match the gender. Some names might be deemed suitable for both genders.
In the USA, you can name your kid what you want. This avoids one ethnic group requiring everyone to have a name from their tradition.
Picabo Street (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picabo_Street).
Finland has some naming rules, but they don't necessarily apply to everyone in the country because they're rules for naming people born here, rather than those who later moved here.
There is a public index of forenames and surnames which I learned about when I was with my pregnant wife, and back then I was obsessively searching for my/our surname to see it increase by one when our newborn was registered and became "official".
Apparently within the whole of Finland there 22 men with the same surname as me, and 25 women. 21 of these people are in Finland and 26 are abroad but known.
Interestingly if I go to the forename search and look for people named "Steve" there are < 5 women with that name (i.e. non-zero, but the number masked for privacy reasons):
https://nimipalvelu.dvv.fi/en/forename-search?name=Steve
I'm curious about the origin there, though of course I've seen Steve -> Steffan -> Stephany, and similar translations in the past.
That sent me down a rabbit hole. Seems like having rules on what you can name your own kid are in place in several European countries. From an American perspective, I find this simultaneously off-putting (you are going to tell ME what I can name MY OWN child?!!) and also probably a net positive. I've often thought that a lot of tragedeighs could be averted if hospital registrars ran the names through a checker and pushed back on the parents to verify they really wanted that. But that's based on an assumption that it's often not intentional.
Except the kid is not YOUR OWN child, in the meaning of possession. You are the custodian to the child, not the owner. The child basically is owned by itself and you are (usually) allowed to take care of it and lead it on that way.
And there are tons of laws that forbid abusing childs. Like you can't hit them, shake them. In the USA they perhaps have a law that you can't put them in a microwave, I dunno.
And the laws in the european countries that forbid silly names are usually not restrict your "owners rights", but to protect the kid. In Germany, I mean, over here they forbid that people called their kid "Rumpelstilzchen", the name of an imp/goblin in a very well know fairy tale. If the parents would have come through I expect that the kid would have ridiculed in school and outside quite a lot. Other kids can be cruel ... and even the odd mindless adult.
Actual names that german parents wanted for their kids, but that weren't granted: Bierstübl, Borussia, Crazy Horse, Gastritis, Grammophon, Januar, Joghurt, Kirsche, Liebknecht, McDonald, Millenium, Möhre, Pfefferminze, Pilulla, Porsche, Rosenherz, Rumpelstilzchen, Satan, Schmitz, Schnucki, Schröder, Seerose, Sputnik, Störenfried, Rasputin, Verleihnix, Waldmeister, Whisky, Woodstock
Some have outright negative connotation (Satan, Störenfried, Rumpelstilzchen), others are just extremely uncommon and thus standing out. For example, in Germany we don't name girls about other things like Melody, Crystal, Daisy, Faith, Grace, Haven, Hazel, Amber, etc. So if you name your kid after a product or a thing, e.g. Porsche, Kirsche or Joghurt, then it will draw the wrath of the other kids onto itself.
And THAT is the reason the authorities don't allow a name. It's not about unusualness alone. A lot of unusual first names were the parents could show "Esenosarumensemwonken is a first name in Nigeria" go through.
> Porsche
Really? With the spelling Portia it's a perfectly respectable girl's name in English, why not in German? Or are they completely unrelated? The English Portia stems from Brutus' wife.
Surely it was the name of a person long before it was the name of a thing?
Do they also forbid Mercedes?
> you are going to tell ME what I can name MY OWN child?!! and also probably a net positive
Never a more succinct description of why it's hard to make things better.
The Catholic Church also regulates given or baptismal names:
https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/docume....It is customary for anyone receiving Confirmation to choose a patron saint, but this name is not essential to the ceremony, and not usually added to one's legal or commonly-used names.
Men and women entering consecrated religious life often receive a religious name. Sometimes their surname is suppressed. Their new name may be chosen by their institute, community or their superior. It is not uncommon to see compound names, and opposite-gendered names in usage there.
I'm not sure "a lot" is accurate, although certainly more than I expected.
Looks like Europe has several countries with legal requirements, although the trend there is moving the other direction, plus Chile.
We associate names ending with a vowel sound with the female gender. Other than that there's nothing gendered about "Hilary" as a first name.
…Why would it be surprising for the USA not to have such a requirement?
The US has unusually common unisex naming. Most other countries don't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_(name) - It's not an exclusively female name. But in the US, you can give a kid pretty much any name you want (see the names Musk gives his kids these days).
I'm genuinely curious what your understanding of American culture is such that you find it surprising that Americans wouldn't tolerate government intervention in how they name their kids.
But Jean (English name, like Jeannie) and Jean (French form of John) are entirely different names, with different pronunciations, that happen to share the same spelling.
Yep, my wife and I have the same middle name: Jean. I’m French and she’s British :)
I am curious how you define "entirely different", because where I am looking, all the names you mention have parallel etymologies, the same origins, and similar meanings. We find them with different pronounciations and many spellings, because of the regional languages spoken, but they were adopted into a multitude of languages from the same sources. So how do you consider them "entirely different"?
This article misleads by presenting these transitions as from "popular boys name" to "popular girls name", when in fact most of the cases here are from "rare name, sometimes used for boys and sometimes girls" to "suddenly trendy for girls".
To take Ashley as an example. This name suddenly started ramping up in popularity in the 60s. In 1970, there were 927 girls named Ashley in the U.S. It peaked at 54,856 in 1987.
It became notably more popular for boys at roughly the same time! The peak of M Ashley was in 1980, at 746. (Note: it's also very likely that these numbers are wrong. The SSA data also has 56 male Marys in 1980, which is likely the result of coding error.)
Meanwhile, in 1945, solidly in the time period when the article would like you believe that Ashley was solidly a boys name, there were 57 M Ashleys and 10 F. 1950 was 55 M/15 F. Prior to 1960, a "good" year for Ashley was around 100 total babies, with some split of both M and F.
To me, a more honest interpretation of this data is that Ashley was a somewhat unisex, but mostly just very uncommon, name that suddenly became trendy in the 1960s, especially for girls but also for boys.
It did fall in popularity much faster for boys than girls, perhaps as it became to be perceived as feminine due to its popularity for girls. But note that even today, Ashley is still used as a boys name! There were 69 M Ashleys in 2009 and 27 M Ashleys in 2025 (by which point the prevalence of coding error is much lower -- M Mary has fallen out of the data set entirely).
The 2025 F:M ratio of 1829:27 is pretty high, so it's fair to say that Ashley would now read as feminine to many Americans (but note, still less so than Mary). It's much less clear to me that you can conclude from the 1945 M:F ratio of 55:10 that it was once a boys name.
Edit: I noticed that the "How we measured it" notes at the bottom mention this shape for Ashley. But I want to note that it's not unique to that name. Dana, another well-known example of "girls name that used to be a boys name" is very similar. Suddenly trendy in the 40s for both boys AND girls, relatively unisex and uncommon for both prior to that, with usage for boys dropping off relatively quickly as girls' usage continued to rise.
Likewise for Lindsay -- suddenly trendy (this time just for girls) in the 70s. Before then, fairly unisex. 1950 has F:M ratio of 116:97.
This sounded dubious to me, for Ashley in particular. In my genealogy research, it is a common name for men in the southern USA in the mid to late 19th century, and names used to be much more regionally bound. So I checked - I'm seeing about 60k Ashleys in the 1870 Tennessee census, out of 1.2 million people. That is about 5%, higher than Ashley ever got nationally as a girl name at its peak later. But over half of those are labeled female! 35k vs. 25k! Not sure about the data quality in my searches (I am not checking the familysearch transcriptions on tens of thousands of census record scans) but well, I was surprised so I thought I would share.
It is certainly possible that Ashley was once a popular boy name. The point is that, contra the article, there is no evidence for this in the SSA data they have based their analysis on.
I think a lot of these cases would be hard to answer definitively just because we don't really have accurate data more than a century back. And the fact that lots of people will repeat the claim "Ashley used to be a boys name" can be equally well explained by the fact that parents had to say something when their sons asked why they gave them a girl name, and they didn't have the data either.
What is true is that people who named their sons Ashley or Dana or Lindsay, at the time, most likely did not perceive those names as feminine.
My "This" above was vague/ambiguous, sorry. Yes, I only meant, it seemed dubious to me that Ashley wasn't a predominantly boy name, in those times and places where it was actually common prior to the girl peak. (Which was not substantiated by the only data I checked of course.) Your actual substantive points make full sense, cheers.
1969 even has a single record of a boy called Sue, entered by a Mr. J. Cash.
I know you're joking but the SSA data omits names given to fewer than 5 babies (of a given sex) in a year.
Also there is a male character named Ashley in Gone with the Wind, which was extremely popular since book release in 1936 and movie in 1939. You would think there should be a lot of boys named Ashley in the 50s and 60s.
I feel like a lot of these can be tied to one famous person with the name causing the gender to flip.
[dead]
Interesting data. Nightmare color scale for the colorblind.
Not colorblind, but I like to pick color schemes off of https://colorbrewer2.org/ for this reason.
Something like https://colorbrewer2.org/#type=diverging&scheme=PiYG&n=11 would probably have been suitable here (listed among the colorblind-safe options for diverging schemes).
Red and blue is so obvious for girls and boys, so I really wonder what made someone deviate from that??
Yeah I can't read the charts at all.
Came here to say the same. Anyone doing data visualization should think long and hard before using something beside a line or bar chart. Almost everything else is worse in multiple ways.
If they used these chart types, though, it would be too obvious that the data doesn't tell the story they want it to!
While I've never met anyone named Jody, it was a common nickname decades past in the US Army for the guy who your girl is cheating with while you're deployed. I'm surprised to see it was considered a female name in the time I would have expected it to be more definitely male, given that context.
Looking it up, it appears that the original name was "Joe" rather than "Jody", so maybe that's the distinction in the early 20th.
Jody Foster?
While I haven't met her, that definitely is someone I knew about, so, yeah. Just didn't think of her.
A name I was surprised by was someone I know naming their daughter Miles/Myles, which is such a male name in my mind. It might even be based on the Latin word for soldier. It's not one I've seen used for a girl anywhere else, yet.
Edited slightly for series spoilers:
> "Well, I wish you every joy," Miles went on [...] He managed a wink. "Name the first one after me, eh?"
> [She] grinned. "I'm not sure she'd appreciate that. Milesanna? Milesia?"
> "Milesia sounds like a disease," Miles admitted, taken aback. "In that case, don't. I wouldn't want her to grow up hating me in absentia."
-- Memory (1996) by Lois McMaster Bujold
In the series, Miles having a name meaning "soldier" is, er, persistently thematically significant.
Wow. Kind of blast from the past. I haven't read that btw, how good is it?
I'm obviously a biased source, but I metaphorically keep the Vorkosigan books [0] in a similar place with the (more-famous) Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. Both are fun reads to return to which I also find very quotable. (Although one is space-opera and the other is satirical-fantasy.)
Interestingly, the first few books are about Miles' parents, but it's neat to see what the most popular character does/doesn't inherit.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorkosigan_Saga
Interesting, I guess my two favourite SF/F writers are Pratchett and Iain M. Banks (who also wrote basically space opera) (my favourite kind of opera).
I'll have to check out the Vorkosigan books. I used to read a lot more and older Sci-Fi but I started finding it repetitive and samey.
Not sure if they person you know is a millennial, but I have noticed of this (my) generation that they love not only gender-ambiguous names, but to name girls with decidedly male-coded names.
> It might even be based on the Latin word for soldier.
It isn't!
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Miles
>> From Old French given name Milo, of problematic origin, possibly from an unknown Germanic element, or a short form of Slavic names beginning with mil- "grace, favor". The English form is associated by folk etymology with Latin mīles ("soldier").
It would be nice to know that the Old French name didn't secretly happen to match the hypothetical Old French form of the Latin word for soldier. I sadly don't personally know how to check what form miles, militis would have taken in Old French.
A good heuristic, though, is that if the French name had come from this very common Latin word, someone would have already thought of that (as has in fact happened many times) and it would have been thoroughly investigated. The evidence in support must be somewhere between "wafer-thin" and "robustly contradicted by the known sound changes from Latin to French".
Only somewhat related but my parents named me a fairly common, if niche in America, name. But they declared it to be pronounced like another common name. For example, naming me Joan but having it pronounced Jane. They claimed that it was some Old World way to pronounce it that they found in a book.
I grew up not thinking about it much (it's my name). I think it even helped me socially a bit when I was younger...it was a pretty good conversation starter. Now that I'm middle-aged, it's an annoying thing I have to state at the start of meetings.
I've since grown tired of correcting everyone and now a lot of people go around calling me Joan, and no one knows who they're talking about anymore :)
Most surprising was "Mario" becoming shared. "Maria/Mario" seemed inherently gendered, based on the last letter.
I think it says "Marlo"? Not "Mario". L, not I.
It does. The huge change is due to the TV show That Girl. The star's name was Marlo Thomas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Girl
Marlo/Marla is also inherently gendered
for people from languages that mark gender with an ending (romance languages for instance), putting the "wrong" ending something like a noun would sound odd or change the meaning
And Marlo Thomas was That Girl.
Interestingly if I remember correctly they have different origins, Maria is a biblical name, while Mario comes from Latin (which can decline Marius to Maria, but that’s a different word)
It has been my experience as a long-time worker with youth groups that the recent trend for gen-alpha girls names is to bring back Victorian-era names (Blanche, Pearl, Gertrude, etc) and for boys new names have been coined indicating testosterone or aggression (Trucker, Hunter, Killer, Fleshrenderer -- okay, maybe I made that last one up). One year every boy in my youth group seemed to be named Jaxon or Finnigan though.
There's definitely a new gendered name dichotomy going on. We'll have to wait a few years before these trends start showing up in the census data though.
You don't need to wait that long. Data from 2025 is already available. Hunter isn't in the top 100, and Trucker and Killer (lol) aren't in the top 1000. Those are two exceptionally weird and unfortunate names.
> https://www.whattoexpect.com/baby-names/list/top-baby-names-...
Liam and Mateo aside, the top 20 could have been pulled from 1840. Tradition still reigns, and Victorian-era names for boys are the rule rather than the exception.
Liam, the #1, is rather weird -- kind of modern and pan-ethnic -- and there are a lot of low-class-coded names like Ronin, Odin, Cash, Royal, etc. These tend to be confusing headscratchers more than they are aggressive, though.
Names that end with -er are in general quite rare. That said, it's true that Archer is in the top 100, and Gunner is somewhere around #500.
In the US, I think the most reliable source for name trends is the Social Security Administration [0], not the US Census. Relevant because they summarize baby names every year, so you don’t have to wait.
[0] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/index.html
In Poland it used to be quite common to give boys "Maria" as a second name. I think it's a Catholic thing.
It's the same in Spanish-speaking countries: "José María", "Luis María", etc. And the other way around too, women name "María José". Regarding the last one, there are many women named "María <X>" who go around by their second name "<X>", as María is way too common.
In Belgium too. But it came from the habit of making the second and third name the name of the godparents, combined with so many women being named Maria. And yes, godparents are a Christian thing.
I'm French and my son's name is Camille. It was exclusively a masculine name until the 19th century (Camille Pissarro, Camille Desmoulins, etc.) then gradually became feminine. By the 80s and 90s, it was overwhelmingly used for girls, but now it's pretty evenly split again, with boys starting to slightly outnumber girls. What i find fascinating is that i don't really like Camille as a girl's name but i love it for a boy! It conjures up completely different images in my mind.
There are many other popular unisex names in France right now: Charlie, Sacha, Lou,...
This reminds of of this tool [1]. It's a wasm that shows "overrepresented baby names". Choose a state, choose a time frame, it will tell you which names were given more in that state compared to all other states. Ever heard of an "Alaska Name" or an "Idaho Name"... find them with this tool.
[1] https://docs.malloydata.dev/malloyyo-babynames/over-represen...
Most interesting thing that stands out to me is the number of names that appear to be what I would consider an abbreviation of a more traditional name.
e.g. “Pat” is cited, but doesn’t specify whether that refers to Patricia or Patrick.
These are presumably from Social Security registrations, so reflecting official given names.
Another interesting analysis would be the movement back and forth between full names and their associated common diminutives.
Yes, the data comes from the US Social Security Administration from 1936–2025
Source: The expandable "How we measured it" section at the bottom of the page
Common nicknames eventually just become given names on their own, like "Jack" or "John" or "Alex".
I've noticed more girls are being named Parker these days. My 1yo son is named Parker. He's holding the line.
The trend of surnames as given names is stranger to me than traditional gender reversal of names.
They go hand-in-hand. Surnames aren't gendered. Names that reverse gender are often surnames used as given names.
"John" or "Matthew" are probably never going to become female. Nor will "Elizabeth" or "Katherine" become male.
"Spencer" was male when Spencer Tracy was a big name. Today it could go either way. As a family name it relates to the profession of a steward.
Surnames are gendered in some languages, typically when they're defined as gendered adjectives.
In Polish '...ski' is masculine and '...ska' is feminine. The prefix stays the same, so a brother and sister have slightly different surnames. (Like 'Wolski' vs 'Wolska.')
In the US some immigrants forgot this, so you get American women with a '...ski' surname.
I don’t think it’s only that, but in many Western European societies (and those derived thereof) it would have been unusual to have members of a family with surnames spelled differently, even if only the suffix.
So the whole family may just have taken the male head of house’s surname to avoid problems, or even been simply assigned his surname by immigration officials.
Many a name were changed at Ellis Island, for example.
Good point. I think Russian surnames are the same right? (Ivanov/Ivanova etc.)
Is it common in these cultures to use surnames as given names?
Those aren't family names but rather patronyms or matronyms (respectively); they directly translate to "son/daughter of Ivan". As I understand though, matronyms are often based on the name of the person's mother, so Ivanova wouldn't be a common name.
That said, I don't speak Russian and have only a passing familiarity with the construction of Russian names, so don't take this as gospel.
GP is correct. Ivanov or Ivanova would generally be surnames, whereas Ivanov or Ivanov[n]a would be patronyms. In Russian culture, they generally don't use matronyms. And yes, it is indeed common in Russia to refer to individuals whom you are not close with using their surname, similar to Japanese culture.
Only ever heard of matronym use as a joke or very archaic.
Referring with surname only is a hierarchy assertion thing, and somewhat rude - boss would talk down to subordinate like that, or teacher to student. When talking "up" or "sideways", or "down" but without a desire to assert superiority a name+patronymic is usually used, which reflects a respectful distance while not slipping into rudeness or overt familiarity. Sadly, it is mostly disappearing and giving way to Western "name-only".
And then, to emphasize familiarity, some groups adopt way of referring to each other by patronymic only :)
Patronyms, derived from name Ivan would be Ivanovich/Ivanovna
Generally, -vich suffix is used in masculine form and -vna suffix in feminine form.
You are right, my bad.
In Iceland, patronymics are also gendered and may sound quite familiar: "Björk Guðmundsdóttir" is their most famous example today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_name
In high school, we referred to our teachers by honorific and surname, and we were also addressed by surname, even by our peers.
When I rewatched the Harry Potter film series this year, I began paying attention to how Harry was addressed. Draco Malfoy called him "Potter". So did many teachers: "Mr Potter". He who must not be named called him "Harry" and many epithets like "the boy who lived". Hagrid and Professor Dumbledore, at least in private, called him "Harry" all the time.
This is especially interesting, because "Potter" is a homophone with the Latin Pater, meaning "Father".
I had a classmate with surname Potter and the teacher loved calling him that LOL.
I don't think so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanov says it's a surname, equivalent to "Johnson" (since Ivan is Slavic for John).
In the old days Johnson might've meant literally "son of John" but no longer. All of the people with the surname "Ivanov(a)" on that page also have a patronym, which in the West would be considered a middle name.
They did not necessarily forget the rule, it’s just inconvenience, especially when dealing with official business, when you have to explain why (for example) your kid’s last name is slightly different than yours.
A surname ending in “son” could be seen as at least a little bit gendered.
You'd think so, but Allison is firmly in the girls camp today, at least in the US (Liverpool FC's male goalkeeper Alisson Becker is Brazilian). Madison is also more associated with girls.
Surnames or occupations (Tanner, Cooper, etc)
You never know, OP's son might one day work as a valet.
s/Never trust a man with two first names/Never trust a man with two last names/.
My sisters both have last-name first names that are commonly used for both genders, and one of those sisters has 3 kids, all with last-name first names. It's weird, but it beats everyone having a biblical name.
He can't lose!
I don't know why but the very specific episodes of when he buys a convertible and when he gets his friend to break his video game addiction still live rent free in my head. I can't remember anything else about the series.
Parker Lewis came out during my blunder Years, he was a role model. He was that kid just a few years older who had it all figured out. I buttoned my shirts to the adam's apple like Parker Lewis. I styled my hair like him.
>I've noticed more girls are being named Parker these days. My 1yo son is named Parker. He's holding the line.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was related to the character[0] portrayed by Beth Riesgraf[2] on Leverage[1]
[0] https://leverage.fandom.com/wiki/Parker
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leverage_(American_TV_series)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beth_Riesgraf
Is this site referring to global or US trends? I don't see it mentionned anywhere.
All the Leslie I know are men for instance, so I have a feeling this balance might be purely regional but what do I know.
> Looking at US baby names from 1936 to 2025
Second paragraph
I am not sure what to make of this, but the names there are ones that sound very American to me.
However the most popular names in the US are not that different from those in the UK, with few of the girls' names sounding American or unusual: https://namedaisy.com/blog/us-vs-uk-top-100-baby-names-2025 and not that many of the boys'.
Surprised Madison isn't on there as a boy name that became a girl name. It was a traditionally male surname (eg Madison, Wisconsin, the state capital, was named after James Madison) until the 1984 movie Splash, where a woman has to make up a name, looks around, sees a street sign for Madison Avenue, and says her name is "Madison". That was understood to be a joke at the time, akin to someone calling themselves Broadway, but because of that movie it quickly became a popular female given name. Personally when I was choosing my name, it came down to between Madison and Madeline, and the traditional masculine association of the former tilted me towards choosing the latter
What's a ' traditionally male surname ', aren't they given to daughters and wives, too?
Madison is literally "Madi's son". Madi's daughter would have been Madisdottir.
I'm surprised Ryan wasn't on the list. Traditionally a boys name, but I know at least 3 women named Ryan. Maybe it hasn't reached a tipping point yet.
The most famous Ryans today are Reynolds and Gosling. I think that's enough to keep it masculine for one more generation.
[dead]
Funny how this is country specific. Some of these would still be very unusual to have changed in the U.K… Ashley in particular, I’ve seen it as a girl’s name but only rarely here.
Just a data point from the SFBA ...
There are a lot of Ronins. Lots.
Sometime 8-12 years ago, dads in Marin got a glint in their eye:
"My son ... the wayward samurai ..."
Depending on whether we model the data linearly or exponentially (like the famous Tohoku University study that found everyone in Japan will be named Sato by 2531)...
The US may reach the 100% Boy Name Ronin-ification anywhere between 2057 or 10,327 AD.
The shift that seems the weirdest to me is "Anne" shifting from a male name to a female name. This happened long before the US was formed, but it always surprises me when I read about a renaissance soldier named Anne.
As the Wikipedia article for Anne de Montmorency explains, he was named after his godmother. Anne has always been a predominantly female name, all the way back to its progenitor St. Anna.
In a rural area I visit frequently there is a couple in their 70s who run their own greenhouse selling flowers. One goes by Gene/Jean/Jeanne, and the other is Fran and I always get them mixed up because the names can be used interchangeably for either sex.
Reminds me of Charles and Ray Eames.
>McKinley
I find it all the more disturbing that a patronymic surname has become a forename.
In my native Italy, ‘Andrea’ is a boy’s name.
As someone who doesn't have kids yet and so doesn't meet a lot of new borns I found the names on this super surprising. Our intuition around names is almsot exclusively formed by our own age group and people older than us. For many of this it was shocking to me that within my lifetime (I'm under 30) names had gone from almost exclusively male to exclusively female. I guess this is why you end up with so many parents all choosing the same small set of names each believing they are choosing a unique name because they've never met an adult with that name.
I was asked once how I felt about the fact that the name I chose for my daughter was primarily used (in America) by Asian immigrants. I noted that they had this impression only because they grew up at the nadir of the name's popularity. It's much more popular now (still not top 50) which means that by the time my daughter is grown up, it will have lost that association, to whatever extent it briefly obtained.
This is also what happened to all those male Ashleys in the 70s. People picked up on the name's trendiness, but didn't initially realize it was vastly more popular for girls and would soon be seen as feminine.
Wonderful little bit of data analysis. I appreciate that the data visualisations let us see the answer from just a scan, no reading required (except the legend to make sense of the colours).
Tangent: I assumed this was a clever piece of marketing for an underlying company, but looks like 'NameDaisy' is purely a personal project (as opposed to a business).
I’d be curious if men with female names get rejected out of a lot of job interviews since the employer may have thought they chose a female for DEI and then a man shows up?
Or maybe it’s a good way to get your foot in the door in todays job market.
Probably more likely that they don't get the interview because the person reviewing their CV assumed they were a woman...
Ha, you had me at "person". As if people review resumes anymore!
Interesting how spelling may come into play e.g. Lee vs Leigh
I like how "Pat" moved to "Insufficient data" right about when SNL started running their "Pat" skits.
This was exactly my thought as well. The "Pat" skits showed up right around 1990 [1], were very popular, and didn't exactly paint "Pat" in a nice light. I wouldn't be surprised if would-be parents saw those skits and began actively avoiding the name.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_(Saturday_Night_Live)#:~:t...
I was very much shocked to see a feminine version of my name used IIRC on Dead Or Alive 4 (DOA4), not knowing the backstory: I think it was a character called Leon was promising to avenge his dead girlfriend, Rolande.
I've wondered if the women that have carried the name have liked it? In my mind, it's always sounded very blunt so as to be feminine, but I recognize I'm heavily biased when it comes to my own name.
My brother was named Morgan in 1988. I think he's the only male Morgan he knows, but often had class with girls of the same name.
What was he named in other years?
Surprised Sue wasn't mentioned. I had heard that boys had started being called Sue (sample size of 1, but very prominent).
Would be interesting to see if this happens in other cultures/other regions of the world.
Would also be interesting to see why these shifts ever occurred in the first place and why there's a greater move "towards girls" for most of the names.
I'm sure that in itself would be full of revelations
The data sounds interesting, but the visualization is so bad that I one-slopped an alternative: https://www.alwaysleaveanote.com/gender-swapping-names/
Stevie is a girl's name now?
Such a thing will often happen as the result of a celebrity having the name. For instance, famed Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks, whose real name was Stephanie.
Years ago, one of the broadcasters for a Red Sox game was doing some ad read about some event Stevie Nicks was going to be at, but they read her name as "Steve Nicks" instead. Someone else in the booth corrected them, and they responded "I know him well, and I call him Steve". A fan apparently sent them a giant poster of Stevie Nicks, and the others put it up in the booth and teased him about it relentlessly during the next game.
The past tense "was" had me at least looking for an obituary. She is still very much alive
I was referring to the Stephanie part in the past tense. I doubt she's gone by that name since she was a child.
But yes, Stevie is very much still alive.
Interestingly enough, Lindsey, like Lindsey Buckingham, the guitarist of Fleetwood Mac, became a more popular girl's name during Fleetwood Mac's heyday.
Anecdata, but as a USian, it's always been an E/A spelling variation, E male variant, A female variant... YMMV
I'm just going by the article, which has data for both names. If you think it is wrong, take it up with them :)
With the shift happening right after the 1976–1980 square, I'd assume people named their daughter after Stevie Nicks.
In the US, boys would abbreviate Stephen or Steven to Steve. Stevie only for a young boy.
I’m not sure what they are measuring here though - if it’s only birth certificates then I’m sure Stevie is dominated by girls for a long time.
As somebody born with the name Steven I'm curious about the relative popularity of "Steven" vs. "Stephen".
I feel like when I was a child more people were present with a PH, but nowadas virtually nobody. Most of the Stephens I know are "old", and I think "Steve" won.
But no doubt it varies on country, and who you know.
(I legally changed my name from Steven to Steve, a couple of years ago, because it was the only name I'd ever used and it got too tiresome dealing with my official passport, and ID saying one name when I signed/wrote another name on all my official paperwork. To the extent that employers would book flights in one name but my passport was in the other name, cue much hilarity at boarding time..)
My brother was born in 1984 is Stephen. We have only ever called him by that name, Steve never stuck. At the time I thought Steven was the more common spelling already; but we were catholic and he was named for St. Stephen.
I mean, this is US-centric data, but it is probably a shortening of 'Stephanie' or 'Stefanie' [1], the female variant of 'Stephan' or 'Stefan'. It stems from Greek, apparently: Stephanos. Its variant are used entirely throughout Europe, from Portugal to Russia.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanie
Now? Let me introduce you to Stevie Nicks.
Don't be silly.
Moon Unit is a girls name.
Stevie is a nickname for the sweetener Stevia.
I know a boy called Leslie and a girl called George. They're old though.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Yeleycqt1Dw
Ted: I met a girl; she's a cashier.
John: No way! That's awesome! We should fuckin' double date or something, you, me and Lori and w-what's her name?
Ted: White trash name. Guess.
John: Mandy.
Ted: Nope.
John: Marilyn.
Ted: Nope.
John: Brittany?
Ted: Nope.
John: Tiffany.
Ted: Nope.
John: Candace.
Ted: Nope.
John: Don't fuck with me on this! I know this shit!
Ted: Do you see me fuckin' with you? I'm completely serious.
John: Alright, speed round. I'm gonna rattle off some names, and when I hit it, you fuckin' buzz it, okay? You got me?
Ted: You do it. I will tell you. Yeah.
John: Alright: Brandy, Heather, Channing, Brianna, Amber, Serena, Melody, Dakota, Sierra, Bambi, Crystal, Samantha, Autumn, Ruby, Taylor, Tara, Tammy, Lauren, Charlene, Chantelle, Courtney, Misty, Jenny, Krista, Mindy, Noel, Shelby, Trina, Reba, Cassandra, Nikki, Kelsey, Shawna, Jolene, Urleen, Claudia, Savannah, Casey, Dolly, Kendra, Kylie, Chloe, Devon, Emmalou, fuckin' Becky?
Ted: No.
John: Wait; was it any of those names with a "Lynn" after it?
Ted: Yes.
John: Oh, I got you, motherfucker! I got you! [Ted laughs]
John: Okay. Brandi-Lynn, Heather-Lynn...
Ted: Tami-Lynn.
John: [Exasperated] Fuck!
Why are boys green and girls red?
Obviously because roses are red but the grass is greener on the other side.
I'm just really surprised that 21% of Lynn's are boys.
Nice!
I find it interesting that many names I grew up associating to a gender can be genderless, these examples are usually girl names in Mexico: Yuri, Carmen, Karen
"Avery" is hardcoded in my brain as a boy's name because of the magnificent, mindbendingly heartrending Decemberists song.
Not because of Captain Sisko?
Most of the names that flip over seem to be names associated with the gentry class, many of the names seem to be neutral, soft very inoffensive names.
Maybe we can finally stop gendering names. Like… is your handle a “boy” handle or a “girl” handle?
Sometimes, I imagine starting a fully remote, distributed, company, where every employee - including myself - adopts a gender neutral name.
Initially, I thought only a small number of names would be available, but reports like this suggest the options are vast and ever shifting.
Good luck to the Perl function Text::GenderFromName()
Maybe it needs the birthday
I guess it's eternally stuck in the 90s. I didn't see Perl in a long time now. 10-15 years ago it was still everywhere.
edit: No, it's stuck in the 80s: "The data comes from a 5% sampling of Social Security card applications with dates of birth from January 1980 through December 1989"
https://metacpan.org/pod/Text::GenderFromName#REGARDING-THE-...
At what age are social security numbers issued? Folks born in 1989 weren't adults until the 2000s
https://www.ssa.gov/faqs/en/questions/KA-01969.html
> It is a good idea to apply for your child's Social Security number and birth certificate at birth. If you apply at the hospital, the state agency that issues birth certificates will share your child's information with us. Then, we will mail the Social Security card to you. If you wait to apply, there may be delays while we verify your child's birth certificate.
Now they are usually applied for (and issued) at birth because the IRS requires you to provide one for dependants you claim on taxes since 1987.
Before that, usually you got one when you needed one, when you started working.
My SSN was issued when I was five years old.
Why did anyone even try and make this? It's fascinating what incomputable functions people try to shoe-horn into being computable.
I thought you must be joking. You were not!
I'm sure there are a few competing "Falsehoods programmers believe about names" out there by now.
Must be the phytoestrogens in soy.
Skyler/ar is a made up name from the 80s and has always been ambiguous.
My name is Skyler.
The name has definitely become more ambiguous over time. I was born with this name, and I decided to keep it when I transitioned, as I met many trans women that picked this name for themselves.
I can't imagine this is very common, most transgender people seem to pick a new name.
However, "Skyler" is a 1980s respelling of a much earlier Dutch name that was used nearly exclusively for boys, spelled "Schuyler". Allegedly, it dates back to the 1600s.
Lots of sub/exurban made up Taylee McKarty Lakynn style names on the list
All names are made up, though not necessarily from the 80's.
Karen being a Persian boys' name will never stop being funny
Etymologically distinct, though. English Karen is derived from the name Katherine. Persian Karen comes from an ancient Parthian noble house.
Was anyone else’s knee jerk reaction to the headline “Courtney”?
It's super hard to keep track of, I have an app that's designed to help couples name their baby, and I always wanted to stay away from hard-defined gender stuff, but people still want boy/girl categories. So many are both, but to varying degrees. I ended up using a boy/girl/unisex selector, and had Jev tag all the names. It's especially when dealing with other countries, languages, and customs. At the end of the day, it's mostly easier for the user to just swipe left on a name rather than try to pre-eliminate it from their pool.
Missing: Shannon and Ryan.
Ira — reminde me of the famous Ira Kane from the Evolution movie.
I'm gonna credit George RR Martin with flipping Arya in the mid '90s
Ah, back when he still wrote.
Not that I'm bitter or anything
Except it didn't "flip" until 2004. It was also was never really a boys name. In 1990 there were 30 M Aryas and 6 Fs. Prior to 1982 it doesn't occur at all in the SSA data. The very first year that there were more than 100 Aryas total (2002), there were 54 Fs and 79 Ms.
This is kind of gibberish without seeing the name frequency alongside the swing. It's much more likely to see a swing with an infrequent name than a common one.
We’ve got two little girl Mohammeds at our local preschool, so cute
What about Aaron -> Erin ?
To my Irish ear, these are two completely different names, not even slightly similar. (They're also etymologically unrelated.) It blew my mind when discussions on r/namenerds revealed that many Americans consider these names similar or even identical.
For most of my (male) life, people misspelled my name Aaron as Erin fairly regularly. I think that has contributed to the confusion. I also used to get Arron, Airon, and other variants. The "A-A-Ron" skit has made a noticeable difference in recent years.
Aaron is Hebrew and Erin is Irish. They just happen to sound the same.
They don't even sound the same, except in some (not all) American accents. They don't sound even remotely similar to me.
I thought they did not, but after actually vocalizing them I would say they are basically indistinguishable in real (fast) speech.
Once more I find myself wondering whether English really needs different vowels, if they can all be substituted for each other.
English is easy to speak but hard to write.
Interesting, they sound exactly the same to me, and I cannot even think of how they might sound different to someone else. Care to explain?
Exaggerated, Aaron sounds like "air-ron" and Erin like "ear-ron". It's similar to how some in the US pronounce "pin" and "pen" the same.
Not when pronounced correctly as A-Aron
Sort of reminds me of the color swap of Pink and Blue for Men and Women.
You're the victim of misinformation.
In the past there were no hard associations between sexes and gender and it was possible to find boys wearing some pink clothing, but it was never the case that people associated pink with boys and blue with girls.
There are some limited examples that contribute to the misunderstanding. For example blue is often associated with the Virgin Mary and red (not pink) was considered a manly color often worn by warriors (e.g. the British, the Romans, etc).
---
This is essentially the way reporting works. If you write an article showing that in the past it wouldn't have been bizarre for boys to wear pink you don't get much traction. But if you write how pink was actually worn by boys and it was considered shocking for girls to wear it, then people find that very surprising and you get a lot of views (truth be damned).
It’s easy to confirm that what you’re saying is not so. Ask AI and you'll get specific citations of pink being recommended for boys in the early 20th century: “in the early 1900s, publication guides and trade journals—such as the June 1918 issue of Earnshaw's Infants' Department—recommended pink for boys and blue for girls.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/unraveling-the-colorf...
Thanks for that link, which confirms xdennis's post above is correct. A few lines from that article, emphasis mine:
> blue’s connection with boys and pink’s with girls wasn’t solidified until the mid-20th century... the gendered nature of the colors was either reversed or at best inconsistent (Paoletti’s original argument, which has since been misconstrued as a total reversal).
> ...5 million books published in the U.S. between 1880 and 1980, he found many examples of the standard “blue for boys” and “pink for girls” association, but virtually none for the reverse... “remarkable consistency in gender coding over time” rather than a sharp shift around the 1940s, leading him to conclude that the magazine excerpts often cited as proof of the reversal were anomalies.
> ...follow-up analysis... published between 1881 and 1930... recorded 34 instances of the standard color coding and 28 instances of the reverse... “Pink-blue gender coding showed a certain degree of inconsistency (though not a reversal)... “However, the true extent of that inconsistency is still unclear, as different kinds of sources return dramatically different pictures.”
@ternaryoperator: perhaps that's a good example of AI not being real-world-helpful, if you did ask it for "specific citations of pink being recommended for boys", because that sounds like it was asked to cherry-pick, and did.
Surprised to not see "Jordan" in there, it's the first one that came to my mind.
hard fail on colorblindness accessibility
Why does this happen? This can't be drift because then it would go both ways but it's predominantly moving in one direction.
[flagged]
really, no sue?
fuck them for disabling reverse engineering.
> Failed to verify your browser > > Vercel Security Checkpoint | iad1::1793644520-hvXR6jD3A6jJoFcEhxLm7uNyDy9O2Ibl
Super informative article.
A wonderful example of how gender is a social construct.
In English, maybe. Several other languages have gendered nouns, so names are not interchangeable. For example "Ιωάννης" in Greek is the male form of "John" given exclusively to male children, whereas "Ιωάννα" is the female form given exclusively to female children. No exceptions. AFAIU if a person wished to change their name from "Ιωάννης" to "Ιωάννα" they would have to go to court and change their birth gender also.
Legal systems and language are a social construct. Your example doesn’t really disprove the assertion. (I’m not sure how these data promote the hypothesis either.)
Green to orange? Why not blue to pink? I know it is stereotypical, but it is the natural colouring.
I'm not sure what you mean by "natural" coloring, but the association you're describing has also reversed over time; i.e., pink was considered masculine and blue was considered feminine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendered_associations_of_pink_...
> the association you're describing has also reversed over time; i.e., pink was considered masculine and blue was considered feminine.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendered_associations_of_pink_...
Yeah, so what if it changed a long time ago? If it was back then, when these were reversed, I would suggest the then current stereotype coloring.
This is like telling me you cannot pronounce sounds in modern English because prior to the Great Vowel Shift, they sounded different.
I suppose I just find it odd that you’re recommending a gendered approach to color (which is fluid, depending on time or country) on a post that is highlighting how our perception of gender (when it comes to names) is fluid.
The link doesn't support your claim. There is no evidence of a reversal, and the original researcher most subsequent authors cited apparently never suggested there was, only that it was inconsistently applied.
I have heard and I do believe that there are countries that use other colors for babies, but wouldn't trust wikipedia nor its selective sources on any topic like gender; wikipedia is no longer enslaved to the truth.
You absolutely should trust wikipedia unless you can provide some evidence to the contrary; in fact, the linked article even has a whole section to support your doubt about the claim*('s veracity), which was interesting to read!
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendered_associations_of_pink_...
> In a 2017 letter to Archives of Sexual Behavior, researcher Marco Del Giudice commented on earlier claims about a supposed shift in pink–blue color associations or preferences sometime around the 1940s, from pink for boys and blue for girls before that period, to the opposite alignment afterward. He summarized his earlier work from 2012 which found "no evidence of either reversed or inconsistent usage prior to the 1940s".[41] Del Giudice called this theory the "Pink–blue reversal" (PBR), and said it was "usually attributed to [Jo] Paoletti", and quoted from five academic articles that reprised the theory of "pink is for boys" prior to the 1940s. However, he found upon analysis that it was exceptionally difficult to actually document such a shift, and exclaimed upon "the thinness of the evidence presented in support of the PBR".[42]
> In his 2012 paper, Del Giudice quoted from four articles published in academic journals which all echoed the claims about PBR theory, many relying on Paoletti, including Chiu et al., 2006: "Prior to that decade, Paoletti ... noted that the sex-dimorphic color coding of pink and blue was inverted, i.e., infant boys were dressed in pink and infant girls were dressed in blue";[43] Frassanito & Pettorini (2008): "At one point, pink was considered more of a boy's color ... blue was considered more for girls";[44] Cohen (2013): "the current stereotypical American assignment of pink to girls and blue to boys was reversed a century ago";[45] and Zucker (2005): "Yet, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, there is evidence that the gender-dimorphic nature of these two colors was inverted, that is, blue was judged to be stereotypically feminine whereas pink was judged to be stereotypically masculine."[46][47] But Paoletti never made the claim that pink and blue reversed, only that there was inconsistent usage that took until the 1950s to resolve[42] starting from the first appearances of gendered pink and blue color associations around the 1860s.[7]
tl;dr - gender is very clearly a social construct and we shouldn't get hung up on colors or names
- edited for clarity
>gender is very clearly a social construct and we shouldn't get hung up on colors or names
Why? Is there some reason we shouldn't get "hung up" about social constructs? Can you argue a reason for this without reference to other social constructs?
Can you argue the reverse, i.e. why we should get hung up on social constructs, without reference to other social constructs?
>in fact, the linked article even has a whole section to support your doubt about the claim
I didn't say I doubted the claim, in fact I went to the trouble to say I believed it. So you should try again to glean what I could have meant.
> You absolutely should trust wikipedia unless you can provide some evidence to the contrary
ur turn to glean
i asked you first and you didn't answer what I asked, so why should I do what you ask? I am prepared to refute your point, but we need to stick to the agenda as set down.