Names that are more dog or more human

There appears to be a trend of using human names for pets. Alyssa Fowers and Chris Alcantara, for WP’s Department of Data, asked the natural questions that come after: “How human is your dog’s name? How doggy is your name?” Enter your own name or a dog’s name to see where it falls on the dog to human scale.

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More gender-neutral names

Georgios Karamanis plotted the ratio of girls-to-boys over time for all the names in the Social Security Administration dataset. You can see the more gender-specific names at the edges and more gender-neutral names clustering in the middle.

Those dips in 1989 and 2004 are curious. Otherwise, the increase in gender-neutral names seems to match up with my analysis from a while back.

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Evolution of Chinese names

For Kontinentalist, Isabella Chua took a dive into the evolution of Chinese names:

Put simply, names encode the wishes parents have for their children.

So, what were these wishes? For answers, I turned to the Chinese name database, which covers the surname and given-name characters for almost all 1.2 billion Han Chinese—the ethnic majority in China—individuals born between 1930 and 2008. I’ve focused only on given names here rather than surnames; given names are subject to parents’ discretion, whereas surnames are inherited.

If you’re unfamiliar with Chinese names, Chua provides good explanations and audio pronunciations to make it easier to follow along.

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Karen equivalents, based on name data

The name Karen. It’s not a common baby name these days. It peaked in the 1960s. The Pudding looked for other names in US history that followed similar trends:

To put this question to the test, we checked baby names from the last 100 years and eliminated those that: 1) never made it into the Top 20 most popular names in any year and 2) were not present in the top list for at least 50 out of 100 years. That left us with 129 female names and 76 male names (yes, we’re going there too!). We tested each of these names, looking for the ones that most closely matched Karen’s rise and fall in popularity.

You can also search for your own name to see if it’s a “future Karen.”

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Grandpa Chad distribution

xkcd crossed a rough age distribution of people becoming grandparents with people named “Chad” and “Jason” to highlight the dawn of a new era. The time is now.

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Street suffixes show the organization of cities

The suffixes on street names can say a lot about a neighborhood. A Boulevard elicits a business-centric area whereas a Road or Court might mean a more residential area. So, Erin Davis mapped the suffixes of all the streets in some major cities. [via @NadiehBremer]

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Posted by in maps, names, roads

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Names in movies vs. real life

Here’s a fun spin on the name analysis genre by Mary Zam. She compared the distribution of names used in movies against names used in real life:

Thousands of babies are called Sophia or Abigail, Mason or Dylan every year. But writers do not rush to call the main characters with such names. According to the statistic, almost all of the top names are much less common in the film industry rather than in real life. Seems that they just don’t want to use too ordinary names in their scenarios.

However, there are always some exceptions from this rule such as Jack (up to x3), Maria (x3), Peter (x2) or Sarah (x4.5). But such names makes only about 5-10% of top each decade. On the other hand, there is a bunch of “cinematic” names such as Simon (20 times more often in movies & tv than in real life) and Kate (20 times more often) which you won’t find in the real life top lists.

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The rise and plummet of the name Heather

Hey, no one told me that baby name analysis was back in fashion. Dan Kopf for Quartz, using data from the Social Security Administration, describes the downfall of the name Heather. It exhibited the sharpest decline of all names since 1880.

Talking to Laura Wattenberg:

Wattenberg says the rise and fall of Heather is exemplary of the faddish nature of American names. “When fashion is ready for a name, even a tiny spark can make it take off,” she says. “Heather climbed gradually into popularity through the 1950s and ’60s, then took its biggest leap in 1969, a year that featured a popular Disney TV movie called Guns in the Heather. A whole generation of Heathers followed, at which point Heather became a ‘mom name’ and young parents pulled away.”

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Estimated age based on your name

Name age of George

A while back, Nate Silver and Allison McCann for FiveThirtyEight estimated age based on a person's name using a relatively straightforward calculation. Using data from the Social Security Administration, they looked at number of people given a name in a year and crossed that with actuarial tables for annual deaths.

Randal Olson turned that into an interactive name age calculator. Punch in a name. See the median age distribution.

Here's the distribution for Emmett:

Name age

Using the same cues as FiveThirtyEight, the chart shows a black line that represents the number of people given the name over time and a shaded area shows the estimated number of people with that name who are still alive as of January 2015. Taken together, you essentially get a percentage that converges towards 100%.

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