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.

Same here in Denmark. There are currently 28,054 approved girl names, 22,607 approved boy names, and 1,581 approved unisex names.

Comrade Adam is keeping an eye on the lists and is posting highlights whenever new names are approved: https://kammeratadam.dk/keyword/godkendtefornavne

"Billiee"

A name that really begs to be screamed out loud

> approved

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

I don't think that's unusual. In my country there isn't a fixed official list, but the law says you need to use an actual name (it can be a foreign one). If it seems too crazy it might be denied.

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

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

That’s completely normal in many countries, Germany for example doesn’t let you pick offensive or clearly-bad names for the child. You can’t call your kid Hässlich (Ugly) for example. You can also not use X12-Whatever-Allowed-In-US.

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

Yes, but a veto over an offensive name is different from choose-only-from-allowlist.

[delayed]

Pretty common, the state of California also prevented someone from naming their child "X Æ A-12".

Yes of course you can't name your child Shit Head. Is that a thing your government will print on a birth certificate?

If you give it some thought, it becomes obvious that since any name is used in many public settings, society/state has a legitimate case to prevent offensive naming. That is different from state literally creating an allowlist. The huge middleground is benign names that are in no way offensive but still require you to get an approval from the state. I think this is an overreach, ymmv

In order to lighten the administrative burden that occurs when society/state has a legitimate case to prevent offensive naming, society is likely to create an approve list.

Denmark did use to have "These and only these names" and they were written into the law (yes, there are pages and pages of Danish legislation that are just names), but now any non-offensive name is okay, and for administrative purposes, an "approved"-list is kept for easy reference to things that have already been, well, approved.

Some European states do that, or place restrictions.

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

Absolutely. For example, you can’t name your kid “dipshit” for obvious reasons.

In Iceland, yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Naming_Committee

> No idea what the reason is.

In many western cultures [1] it was (still is, but to a much lesser degree) customary for boy's (especially for the eldest) names to be hereditary. This gives natural tendency for the set of "traditional" boy names to be self reinforcing: remain more closed and maintain relative relevance. There are simply less boys to play with naming.

On top of that, it was common for the eldest son to inherit the estate and produce more offspring, while the younger were much more likely to be enlisted and as a result suffer from early-adulthood mortality. This further reinforces the traditional names.

I wonder how these statistics would look like if it was possible to control for these effects. Maybe look at variety of names among fallen soldiers versus the general population with some time lag?

> Almost all typical boy names have a feminine version

If I were to warrant a guess, I would say this is to quite a large degree an effect of the first-born being a girl and getting a feminized version of the hereditary name.

[1]: https://xkcd.com/285/

Laura becomes Lauro