US boy names that became girl names and vice versa | Hacker News Reader

US boy names that became girl names and vice versa

namedaisy.com

184 pointsxoobdev208 comments

> 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.

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.

I think there's something to this, but also you've got to think about the cultural standards where "female" is considered "abnormal".

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.

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.

> also you've got to think about

We really don’t.

And shouldn’t.

close one, you almost had to think about something there.

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.

Marion Morrison was a definitive male role model.

A baby does not "adopt" their name, though. It is given to them.

> 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.

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

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.

Why would anyone make their kids legal name include “Junior”.

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

they become Jay-Are

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.

(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.

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.

The Sopranos had a main cast Junior, who was also the oldest of the team. Just for some anecdata

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

Never heard that framing before. In New England the practice is associated with blue-blood wealth.

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.

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.

"Junior" might be associated with poor or rural people, but "III" and "IV" can only convey the absolute maximum level of pompousness.

> I have no data but feel that boys tend to get the family names and biblical names (in US anyways).

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.

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.

Doesn't everyone do that? My brother has a grandparents name as his middle. I never thought of it as a gendered tradition

Is it a specific cultural thing I wonder

Possibly. I’ve just heard it more with girls and wouldn’t expect it’s evenly common on relative basis but certainly could be wrong

There was quite a famous Elizabeth II.

> the same pattern held in the opposite direction.

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.

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.

Yeah immigration and mix of similar names from different languages could also be reasons for the (at least perceived) shifts.

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.

Going by the peak time on the chart, Jean flipped over fast right about when Jean-Luc entered public consciousness.

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.

Kim is another good one - I've met several Korean men named Kim.

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).

Australia: Kim was a common 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.

The one that always trips me up is when a man is a Stacey.

I had to call a customer once whose name was Courtney and it tripped me up when it turned out to be a male..

Growing up in the rural midwest, I had no idea Tracy could be a dude's name until I worked with one. (Great guy, btw.)

When I was younger, there was a couple of somewhat-distant relation who would show up occasionally to family events.

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

For me - men named Tracey

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).

Andrea (on-dre-ah vs and-ree-ah) is a true name collision.

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

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.

Yes, I would assume those are feminine names.

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

Around here, all of these would be male with the last vowel removed and female with it.

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.

See https://www.reddit.com r/tragedies for all sorts of, uhh, inventive spellings and names.

> Many of the exceptions will be obviously foreign names with traditional spelling, which can go either way

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.

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 masculine, 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).

The masculine/feminine question of the name Andrea is made weirder by the fact it literally derives from the Greek word for ‘adult male’ (andros)

> 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.

Indo european languages mostly, probably

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).

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.

There was a boy in high school named Ash (he was probably class of 2002). He tried hard to not let anyone know it was short for Ashley.

Ash is a robot.

Ash is a pokemon trainer. (I watched Alien and still had to search up your comment)

I met this Australian actor in person once: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Zukerman

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.

Gotta mention Lindsey Buckingham.

(Way underrated)

Ambiguous couple names are always a challenge. I indirectly know of a Tony and Dawn. Or is it Toni and Don? I can never remember which is which.

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.

[0]: https://dcc.dickinson.edu/grammar/latin/case-endings-five-de...

There are a few common Italian male names end in -a, though.

Andrea, Luca, Nicola are the most common.

Aren't most of these cases of dropping the final s and maybe a vowel from a latin names instead of adding a diminutive a?

Andreas Lucas Nicolas, etc. (perhaps with different spelling in Latin)

All masculine names in Italian that end with -a come from Jews, old testament, with the exceptions of Enea and Nicola.

In a similar vein, the way women's names get shortened into a plethora of variants never ceases to surprise me

Elizabeth

Eliza, Liz, Liza, Lisa, Beth, Betty

There was a guy at my school named Hilary who got awful abuse for it. Always wondered why parents would do such a thing to a child.

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.

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).

…Why would it be surprising for the USA not to have such a requirement?

The US has unusually common unisex naming. Most other countries don't.

We associate names ending with a vowel sound with the female gender. Other than that there's nothing gendered about "Hilary" as a first name.

In the USA, you can name your kid what you want. This avoids one ethnic group requiring everyone to have a name from their tradition.

I'm not sure "a lot" is accurate, although certainly more than I expected.

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

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):

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.

Weird comment, given that it was, not long ago, a common name for a male.

I'd wager if it weren't for Clinton, most people would still associate it with men.

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.

https://namedaisy.com/us/name/Hilary

Hilary Putnam (famous male philosopher) was born in 1926. I imagine soon after this generation is flipped.

Because it's there...

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.

Here's my favorite "Lauren"*: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Bush

*solely because her legal, married name is Lauren Bush Lauren. She actually changed it, which is gold (and honestly very sweet).

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.

> As an adult I routinely get misgendered, but it's a so-what to me.

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...

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.

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.

Did he have a brother named Sue? If so, I might know the reason ...

> 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

Lyrics by Shel Silverstein [0]

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Boy_Named_Sue

Hilary is a boys name that became a girls name. It is also a surname (although the latter usually has a double L).

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.

Yep, my wife and I have the same middle name: Jean. I’m French and she’s British :)

In Poland it used to be quite common to give boys "Maria" as a second name. I think it's a Catholic thing.

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 feel like a lot of these can be tied to one famous person with the name causing the gender to flip.

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'.

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.

Edited slightly for series spoilers:

> "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.

Wow. Kind of blast from the past. I haven't read that btw, how good is it?

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorkosigan_Saga

Ira — reminde me of the famous Ira Kane from the Evolution movie.

I've noticed more girls are being named Parker these days. My 1yo son is named Parker. He's holding the line.

The trend of surnames as given names is stranger to me than traditional gender reversal of names.

Surnames or occupations (Tanner, Cooper, etc)

You never know, OP's son might one day work as a valet.

They go hand-in-hand. Surnames aren't gendered. Names that reverse gender are often surnames used as given names.

"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.

A surname ending in “son” could be seen as at least a little bit gendered.

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.

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.

Good point. I think Russian surnames are the same right? (Ivanov/Ivanova etc.)

Is it common in these cultures to use surnames as given names?

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.

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.

s/Never trust a man with two first names/Never trust a man with two last names/.

He can't lose!

>I've noticed more girls are being named Parker these days. My 1yo son is named Parker. He's holding the line.

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

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.

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

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

I'm surprised Ryan wasn't on the list. Traditionally a boys name, but I know at least 3 women named Ryan. Maybe it hasn't reached a tipping point yet.

The most famous Ryans today are Reynolds and Gosling. I think that's enough to keep it masculine for one more generation.

"Avery" is hardcoded in my brain as a boy's name because of the magnificent, mindbendingly heartrending Decemberists song.

In my native Italy, ‘Andrea’ is a boy’s name.

Just a data point from the SFBA ...

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 ..."

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.

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.

These are presumably from Social Security registrations, so reflecting official given names.

Another interesting analysis would be the movement back and forth between full names and their associated common diminutives.

Yes, the data comes from the US Social Security Administration from 1936–2025

Source: The expandable "How we measured it" section at the bottom of the page

Common nicknames eventually just become given names on their own, like "Jack" or "John" or "Alex".

Nice!

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

The data sounds interesting, but the visualization is so bad that I one-slopped an alternative: https://www.alwaysleaveanote.com/gender-swapping-names/

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.

Interesting data. Nightmare color scale for the colorblind.

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.

Yeah I can't read the charts at all.

Most surprising was "Mario" becoming shared. "Maria/Mario" seemed inherently gendered, based on the last letter.

I think it says "Marlo"? Not "Mario". L, not I.

Marlo/Marla is also inherently gendered

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

And Marlo Thomas was That Girl.

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)

My brother was named Morgan in 1988. I think he's the only male Morgan he knows, but often had class with girls of the same 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.

Probably more likely that they don't get the interview because the person reviewing their CV assumed they were a woman...

Ha, you had me at "person". As if people review resumes anymore!

I'm just really surprised that 21% of Lynn's are boys.

Surprised Sue wasn't mentioned. I had heard that boys had started being called Sue (sample size of 1, but very prominent).

Most of the names that flip over seem to be names associated with the gentry class, many of the names seem to be neutral, soft very inoffensive names.

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.

Stevie is a girl's name now?

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.

Anecdata, but as a USian, it's always been an E/A spelling variation, E male variant, A female variant... YMMV

I'm just going by the article, which has data for both names. If you think it is wrong, take it up with them :)

The past tense "was" had me at least looking for an obituary. She is still very much alive

I was referring to the Stephanie part in the past tense. I doubt she's gone by that name since she was a child.

But yes, Stevie is very much still alive.

With the shift happening right after the 1976–1980 square, I'd assume people named their daughter after Stevie Nicks.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanie

Don't be silly.

Moon Unit is a girls name.

Stevie is a nickname for the sweetener Stevia.

Now? Let me introduce you to Stevie Nicks.

In the US, boys would abbreviate Stephen or Steven to Steve. Stevie only for a young boy.

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.

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'm gonna credit George RR Martin with flipping Arya in the mid '90s

Ah, back when he still wrote.

Not that I'm bitter or anything

Good luck to the Perl function Text::GenderFromName()

Maybe it needs the birthday

I thought you must be joking. You were not!

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"

https://metacpan.org/pod/Text::GenderFromName#REGARDING-THE-...

At what age are social security numbers issued? Folks born in 1989 weren't adults until the 2000s

https://www.ssa.gov/faqs/en/questions/KA-01969.html

> 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.

I'm sure there are a few competing "Falsehoods programmers believe about names" out there by now.

Why did anyone even try and make this? It's fascinating what incomputable functions people try to shoe-horn into being computable.

That’s a silly function, why even try to quantify that?

Missing: Shannon and Ryan.

Surprised to not see "Jordan" in there, it's the first one that came to my mind.

> Failed to verify your browser > > Vercel Security Checkpoint | iad1::1793644520-hvXR6jD3A6jJoFcEhxLm7uNyDy9O2Ibl

Super informative article.

What about Aaron -> Erin ?

Aaron is Hebrew and Erin is Irish. They just happen to sound the same.

They don't even sound the same, except in some (not all) American accents. They don't sound even remotely similar to me.

Interesting, they sound exactly the same to me, and I cannot even think of how they might sound different to someone else. Care to explain?

I thought they did not, but after actually vocalizing them I would say they are basically indistinguishable in real (fast) speech.

Once more I find myself wondering whether English really needs different vowels, if they can all be substituted for each other.

Not when pronounced correctly as A-Aron

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.

Sort of reminds me of the color swap of Pink and Blue for Men and Women.

You're the victim of misinformation.

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.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/unraveling-the-colorf...

A wonderful example of how gender is a social construct.

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.)

Green to orange? Why not blue to pink? I know it is stereotypical, but it is the natural colouring.

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.

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

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!

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

>in fact, the linked article even has a whole section to support your doubt about the claim

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.

> You absolutely should trust wikipedia unless you can provide some evidence to the contrary

ur turn to glean

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.

> the association you're describing has also reversed over time; i.e., pink was considered masculine and blue was considered feminine.

> 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.

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