> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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,...
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"?
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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".
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
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.
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.
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)
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'.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
> 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.
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.
Girls get flowers, gemstones, places, etc. while boys get old grandpa names.
Comrade Adam is keeping an eye on the lists and is posting highlights whenever new names are approved: https://kammeratadam.dk/keyword/godkendtefornavne
A name that really begs to be screamed out loud
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/
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
Funny enough, I think it’s common for the female middle name to be a mom/grandma/aunt name.
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.
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.
Therefore, you just invite confusing answers and useless discussions in your reply.
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.
Is it a specific cultural thing I wonder
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).
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.
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.
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).
Also, IV is really quite rare for boys too. Junior still super common.
How does that work when they’re 60 with grandkids?
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.
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.
Long obsolete except in Iceland.
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.
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.
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
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 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.)
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.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-21329269
We really don’t.
And shouldn’t.
Why that is the case is another question.
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.
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")
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.
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).
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.
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.
1: https://namedaisy.com/us/name/Madison
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splash_(film)
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.
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).
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.
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
that's not how I would pronounce by default, though I suppose I might if star trek TNG wasn't a thing.
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.
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...
Andrea, Luca, Nicola are the most common.
Andreas Lucas Nicolas, etc. (perhaps with different spelling in Latin)
Yes, but also because those names were originally Greek.
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.
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.
'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.
Chris can be short for Christian.
Their names were Kim, and Pinky. Kim was the wife and Pinky was the husband.
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.
> 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"
So the original grammatical gender was feminine, hence the -a termination.
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.
Yes, I was referring to places in the USA.
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.
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-".
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".
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).
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).
Michele and Daniele look like misspellings of Michelle and Danielle though. I don't know any women named Daniele or men named Danielle.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
-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...
Many other Italian words that end with the letter E are changed to I, or mispronounced.
The closest English male names to your examples are Andre/Andrew, Simon, Nicholas/Nick, Michael/Mike, Daniel/Dan. Gianni is John, etc
(Way underrated)
Elizabeth
Eliza, Liz, Liza, Lisa, Beth, Betty
My own name, Joshua, goes against this rule. I don't think it's Latin though.
> 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
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Boy_Named_Sue
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.
It may also have been more popular in the UK than the US.
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.
*solely because her legal, married name is Lauren Bush Lauren. She actually changed it, which is gold (and honestly very sweet).
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...
I'd wager if it weren't for Clinton, most people would still associate it with men.
https://namedaisy.com/us/name/Hilary
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.
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?
Do they also forbid Mercedes?
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.
Never a more succinct description of why it's hard to make things better.
Looks like Europe has several countries with legal requirements, although the trend there is moving the other direction, plus Chile.
There are many other popular unisex names in France right now: Charlie, Sacha, Lou,...
I find it all the more disturbing that a patronymic surname has become a forename.
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.
Second paragraph
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 :)
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).
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.
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.
> "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.
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
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".
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!
[1] https://docs.malloydata.dev/malloyyo-babynames/over-represen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Girl
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
e.g. “Pat” is cited, but doesn’t specify whether that refers to Patricia or Patrick.
Another interesting analysis would be the movement back and forth between full names and their associated common diminutives.
Source: The expandable "How we measured it" section at the bottom of the page
"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.
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.
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.
Is it common in these cultures to use surnames as given names?
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.
Generally, -vich suffix is used in masculine form and -vna suffix in feminine form.
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 :)
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".
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.
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
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'.
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).
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 ..."
The US may reach the 100% Boy Name Ronin-ification anywhere between 2057 or 10,327 AD.
Or maybe it’s a good way to get your foot in the door in todays job market.
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 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
But yes, Stevie is very much still alive.
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.
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..)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanie
Moon Unit is a girls name.
Stevie is a nickname for the sweetener Stevia.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_(Saturday_Night_Live)#:~:t...
Initially, I thought only a small number of names would be available, but reports like this suggest the options are vast and ever shifting.
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
Maybe it needs the birthday
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-...
> 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.
Before that, usually you got one when you needed one, when you started working.
My SSN was issued when I was five years old.
Not that I'm bitter or anything
Super informative article.
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).
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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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendered_associations_of_pink_...
> 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.
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
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 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.
ur turn to glean