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A comment on US boy names that became girl names and vice versa. Parent comment

Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by vforgione on Monday November 02, 2026 @01:52PM (#50341689)
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.
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by georgeburdell on Monday November 02, 2026 @02:15PM (#50342055)
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
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by cogogo on Monday November 02, 2026 @02:28PM (#50342305)
Never heard that framing before. In New England the practice is associated with blue-blood wealth.
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by JumpCrisscross on Monday November 02, 2026 @02:49PM (#50342635)
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.
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by conductr on Monday November 02, 2026 @03:04PM (#50342864)
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

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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by JumpCrisscross on Monday November 02, 2026 @03:26PM (#50343207)
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.
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by ozim on Monday November 02, 2026 @08:38PM (#50346888)
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 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.

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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by vintermann on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:03AM (#50348954)
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.
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by ozim on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @03:55AM (#50349638)
There have historically been also ways where poor stopped rich from being rich and having fancy name was making one a target.
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by dj_rock on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @01:08AM (#50348633)
Yes. Like that William H Gates III from Seattle.
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by rf15 on Monday November 02, 2026 @02:37PM (#50342436)
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.
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by thaumasiotes on Monday November 02, 2026 @04:05PM (#50343742)
"Junior" might be associated with poor or rural people, but "III" and "IV" can only convey the absolute maximum level of pompousness.
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by vel0city on Monday November 02, 2026 @08:42PM (#50346908)
I've known two people in my life who went by some version of Trey as a nickname, as in some slight change if tres, three.
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by conductr on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @08:53AM (#50351984)
Or 3 James was confusing so they probably had a James, a Jim, a JT. No attempt to obscure just trying to yell at a specific person when the trash needs to be taken out.

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

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

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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by conductr on Monday November 02, 2026 @02:02PM (#50341863)
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.

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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by rightnutwingjob on Monday November 02, 2026 @02:46PM (#50342598)
Why would anyone make their kids legal name include “Junior”.

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

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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by KineticLensman on Monday November 02, 2026 @03:27PM (#50343220)
(Brit here)

My first and middle names are John and Richard. A couple of times on trips to the US people have read my initials as 'Jr'. Very surprising the first time! Has never happened to me in the UK.

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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by alistairSH on Monday November 02, 2026 @03:15PM (#50343037)
Yeah, it's a bit weird...

On some forms in the US, it's listed as a suffix. Some agencies enforce it, others do not (SSA does not, for example). And colloquially, when"Senior" dies, the son often stops using "Junior" (though that's not a legal change).

UK, Can, and AUS are similar, but not exactly the same as the US. And NSW in AUS complicates matters by outright prohibiting roman numberals are Jnr/Snr suffixes. Mexico has more restrictions due to the mothers-last-name, fathers-last-name naming convention.

Personally, I dig the Nordic and Arabic "x, son of y, son of z, son of..." patterns.

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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by ascorbic on Monday November 02, 2026 @06:19PM (#50345546)
The UK doesn't really use those kind of suffix at all unless you're the king, so I'd imagine it would be quite hard with forms.
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by ninalanyon on Monday November 02, 2026 @06:36PM (#50345774)
> the Nordic

Long obsolete except in Iceland.

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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by somenameforme on Monday November 02, 2026 @08:04PM (#50346626)
? Jameson, Smithson, Thomson, Wilson, etc, etc.
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by vintermann on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @01:56AM (#50348918)
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.
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by alistairSH on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @09:28AM (#50352431)
Not actively used, but still see the occasional ...son on a surname.
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by terribleperson on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:15PM (#50347989)
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?
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by cowlevel on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:16PM (#50347998)
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.
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by dpark on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:29AM (#50349117)
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.

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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by alistairSH on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @09:30AM (#50352449)
Dunno, but Iceland also enforces it's son-of/daughter-of naming convention to the point some names are explicitly prohibited (or is it explicitly allowed, I forget if it's a black-list or white-list).
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by k12sosse on Monday November 02, 2026 @03:00PM (#50342802)
they become Jay-Are
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by thaumasiotes on Monday November 02, 2026 @04:08PM (#50343779)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junior_Soprano

And it's not even part of his legal name.

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

They get called "grandpa" like everyone else with grandchildren.

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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by nilamo on Monday November 02, 2026 @04:15PM (#50343862)
The Sopranos had a main cast Junior, who was also the oldest of the team. Just for some anecdata
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by Root_Denied on Monday November 02, 2026 @05:57PM (#50345249)
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.
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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa by bonoboTP on Monday November 02, 2026 @06:33PM (#50345740)
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...
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