> 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.

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

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.

Funny enough, I think it’s common for the female middle name to be a mom/grandma/aunt name.

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.

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.

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 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.

I know a lot of people that just go by their middle names in this scenario. Even my brother was named like this and the intent from the beginning was he’d go by his middle name.

I think maximum pompousness goes to those that make sure you know they’re a third or fourth. If I meet you at a cocktail party and will never meet you again, don’t introduce yourself as William H Gates the Third, just say Bill.

Also, IV is really quite rare for boys too. Junior still super common.

How does that work when they’re 60 with grandkids?

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.

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.

Long obsolete except in Iceland.

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.

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.

Before the Acts of Union of 1707, England and Scotland were not united into one kingdom, but two kingdoms that shared the same king under a personal union.

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 things for the Davids Bowie or Essex (or both! - quite possible in my mother's case).

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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, 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 (Carmen, Laura, Marta, Elena, 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

What? The state gets to choose which name can you freely give your child?

People here find it very strange (insane even) that in US you can name your child Apple, North West or X Æ A-Xii.

(I don't have a strong personal opinion on this.)

But apart from that, there’s no list, you can invent names.

In here, for example, the name needs approval to not be harmful to the kid, nor degrading, nor diminutive form of name can be used. Also typos are checked for.

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/

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)

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

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.

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.

Lots of nicknames in Spanish end with an A though, Juanma and Joserra, basically putting together Juan Manuel and Jose Ramon.

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.

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.

> 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).

So the original grammatical gender was feminine, hence the -a termination.

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-".

Their names were Kim, and Pinky. Kim was the wife and Pinky was the husband.

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).

(Way underrated)

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".

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).

The closest English male names to your examples are Andre/Andrew, Simon, Nicholas/Nick, Michael/Mike, Daniel/Dan. Gianni is John, etc

Michele and Daniele look like misspellings of Michelle and Danielle though. I don't know any women named Daniele or men named Danielle.

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.

-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...

Yes, both are used commonly. In names, there are Gabrielle, Cyrielle, Annabelle, Axelle, and many others. I am not sure there is any rule.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Many other Italian words that end with the letter E are changed to I, or mispronounced.

Elizabeth

Eliza, Liz, Liza, Lisa, Beth, Betty

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.

Chris can be short for Christian.

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 all Tonys.

The female short names is usually spelt Toni, but pronounced the same.

With the formal versions, the vowel rule is a good bet, but a lot of the informal versions for both male and female names end in 'sha' (and thus 'a').

Here's a few examples:

- Natalia: Natasha (Female)

- Aleksandr, Aleksandra: Sasha (Male/Female)

- Aleksei: Lyosha (Male)

- Daria: Dasha (Female)

- Oksana (Female)

- Nikita (Male)

- Yurii: Yura (Male)

- Pavel: Pasha (Male)

Keeping it terse here, the list goes on and on, you can come up with an 'a'-endng informal version of almost every male name.

> 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

It may also have been more popular in the UK than the US.

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.

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.

Never a more succinct description of why it's hard to make things better.

Can. 855 Parents, sponsors, and the pastor are to take care that a name foreign to Christian sensibility is not given.

https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/docume....

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?

Looks like Europe has several countries with legal requirements, although the trend there is moving the other direction, plus Chile.

This is also what happened to all those male Ashleys in the 70s. People picked up on the name's trendiness, but didn't initially realize it was vastly more popular for girls and would soon be seen as feminine.

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'.

> "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".

"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.

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.

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.

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 :)

Generally, -vich suffix is used in masculine form and -vna suffix in feminine form.

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".

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.

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

[1] https://docs.malloydata.dev/malloyyo-babynames/over-represen...

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

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.

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

I find it interesting that many names I grew up associating to a gender can be genderless, these examples are usually girl names in Mexico: Yuri, Carmen, Karen

I'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.

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).

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

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

Or maybe it’s a good way to get your foot in the door in todays job market.

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.

Not that I'm bitter or anything

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.

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).

---

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

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

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?

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.

I think a lot of these cases would be hard to answer definitively just because we don't really have accurate data. 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.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_(Saturday_Night_Live)#:~:t...

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 :)

Initially, I thought only a small number of names would be available, but reports like this suggest the options are vast and ever shifting.

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).

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

There are many other popular unisex names in France right now: Charlie, Sacha, Lou,...

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!

I find it all the more disturbing that a patronymic surname has become a forename.

There's definitely a new gendered name dichotomy going on. We'll have to wait a few years before these trends start showing up in the census data though.

> https://www.whattoexpect.com/baby-names/list/top-baby-names-...

Mateo aside, the top 20 could have been pulled from 1840. Tradition still reigns, and Victorian-era names for boys are the rule rather than the exception.

Names that end with -er are in general quite rare, though it's true that Archer is in the top 100, and Gunner is somewhere around #500.

[0] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/index.html