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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

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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.

My guess is no, because carrying the family legacy is falling out of fashion as much as taking the husband's name, maybe even more so.

Family legacy is quite obsolete in modern society.

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.

At least in France, it means the father leaves and the kid doesn't have enough money to study — and we're transitioning to the workplace providing the funding for studies (apprenticeships where the company pays 10k€ per year, empoverishing the worker).

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.

We will probably find out very soon why humans organized the way they did for millennia before we decided to change everything.

Please don't vaguepost on hn. It's hard to guess if this is an attack or a defense of the nuclear family (us other commenters would have to guess if you know how recent that phenomenon is).

Therefore, you just invite confusing answers and useless discussions in your reply.

Please don't gatekeep hn posts. Comments with little interests will receive little replies and others will rise. You adding a reply helps the post you dislike rise over others.

You really can’t understand what I mean when I say humans used to organize themselves in certain ways? Just read about the topic then, humans almost always had a very similar pattern in how society worked which only broke with the transitions from hunters gatherers to agriculture around 10,000 years ago in most regions (though some still haven’t transitioned) and then to industrial society, around 250 to 100 years ago depending on the region. The current era where everyone has electricity and water and all sorts of devices to help with labor is really recent, just less than 100 years. It allowed us to experiment with society building in ways we just couldn’t imagine before. However, we just don’t know if the things we’re doing now are sustainable as we have not had hundreds of years of stable societies to know that. My comment was referring to that. The decline in population growth, rise of loneliness and other problems we have now just didn’t exist before. The changes we made to society are to blame , no question about that, and I think we are still learning just that older societies can’t just be rearranged the way we feel like just because we can, without suffering unpredictable consequences. Does that clarify things for you or should I explain how those pre industrial societies functioned?

>Just read about the topic then >Does that clarify things for you or should I explain how those pre industrial societies functioned?

This level of condescension paired with an equivalent level of ignorance is astounding, especially as the only reason I asked you was because I wanted to steelman your position, but it was so vague that this was hard to do.

I originally asked if you meant the nuclear family with your statement "why humans organized the way they did for millennia before we decided to change everything.", because I wanted to know if you are aware that the nuclear family as a dominant structure is _a lot_ younger than that.

But in another reply, you said that you meant to talk about the nuclear family and the raising of children by the whole tribe. These are very different from each other, and that's why I asked you to clarify. Now I know that you just wanted to express a general feeling of regret that things aren't the way you image them to have been in the past, and your comment didn't contain any real content besides that, I can move on with my life.

To me, it's very clear GP was writing in support of traditional values, of which nuclear family is one.

Yes, same here. But i should admit that i hold somewhat conservative values compared to modern 2016+ societies values.

I consider my values to be very centrist and common sense, however every year i learn more and more that what i consider to be common sense isnt very common.

Yes that was one thing I had in mind, but I also think even older patterns, like the whole tribe contributing to raising the children of everyone, is something worth thinking about. Why did every society did it? And things like that. We have some of those in a modified form today, like daycare, but I feel like we’re straying a bit too far into unknown territory without considering the consequences.

The idea of surnames is an anthropologically recent tradition. Humans living in small communities had no practical need for multiple names. Surnames mostly arise in societies with relatively strong centralized states so that the government has an easier time tracking its citizens (census-taking, tax collecting, etc.).

The idea of being named after your father (or your husband for that matter) is much older than surnames. Don't know exactly how old, because written history is only available for strong centralized states, but at least biblical times.

Yes, but the context of this thread is about taking your father's surname specifically. Even "modern societies" where wives might have the option to not take their husband's surname aren't moving away from naming sons after their fathers, as far as their given name goes.

I meant the "John son of Jack" thing. It was extremely common for thousands of years across pretty much every European culture, and Jews (likely other people too but IDK). Eventually it transformed into surnames by Jackson. The important part is that surnames didn't introduce the idea of father's name being part of your name even if you're not named after him. This was already widely practiced, surnames just streamlined the process and made ancestry more trackable (though some countries still use the old rules to this day. Spain I think, and Iceland maybe?)

Dunno about other cultures, but in Poland it was very common until relatively recently to refer to wives/daughters by a suffixed first name (not surname) of the husband/father. If Mary Higgins married Jack Smith, from then on she'd be known as Jackowa, and their daughter Betty would be called Jackówna. This is distinct from naming children after their ancestors. The custom predates surnames by hundreds of years, but served essentially the same role of tying the women to their men.

That is a bit cliché isn't it? According to INSEE in France 12% of the kids were in shared custody and that is the mean. At 10 y old it is around 15%. And around 24% of the fathers get full custody.

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.

But then if a child succeeds despite whatever failure his father was he is stuck with that looser name.

Why not have him take the Maiden name so everyone can know the mother who failed him?

Why do you frame it as only fathers can fail children? Or only men can do wrong? Women can pay for studies as well, and have just as much duty to their children.

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

All the men on my dad's side of the family have the same middle name, with just a different first name.

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).

Eastern Europe of the Slavic variety enters the chat with a concept of patronymics. Nobody asks you if you want to have a middle name, it's always a deriative of your father's, by law.

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.

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

My children have no middle name, and neither did I or my brother.

> 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.

Not uncommon Jewish names.

Certainly Esther is reasonably common in the U.S., but when I saw her name I was expecting someone about 60 years older.

There is a small trend of using very old names like this, not necessarily biblical but just old sounding. We know an elementary aged girl named Lydia and I always think the last person I knew by that name was my great-great grandmother.

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.

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.

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.

In texas I feel like more than half the Juniors I've met are latin

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 guess latest wave would be “Techno Mechanicus” or whatever the other silly names we heard lately.

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.

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.

There have historically been also ways where poor stopped rich from being rich and having fancy name was making one a target.

Yes. Like that William H Gates III from Seattle.

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.

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

(There was a brief period where my sister was dating someone who went by J.T. The initials were something of an effort to obscure his name, James III.)

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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).

Yes, but that is on a country level, it doesn't vary internally. So it would only be an issue for immigration.

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.

>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.

Having a list of "allowed" names implies another list of "disallowed" names. I am not aware (including names with non 7-bit ASCII characters) of any such list of names that aren't legally allowed to be used.

I'd note that the artist formerly known as Ƭ̵̬̊ legally changed their name to that symbol here in my "presumably English-speaking" country.

I am not aware of any such restrictions where I live. Perhaps it's just where you do?

It's not legal in the US to call your child "fuck this shit I'm out" because it is child abuse.

Ƭ̵̬̊'s legal name is not Ƭ̵̬̊ because government systems can't process that symbol he calls his name. It's not illegal to say your name is Ƭ̵̬̊ but that's not actually your name as the government sees it.

>It's not legal in the US to call your child "fuck this shit I'm out" because it is child abuse.

Which specific statute forbids this? I am not aware of any.

>Ƭ̵̬̊'s legal name is not Ƭ̵̬̊ because government systems can't process that symbol he calls his name. It's not illegal to say your name is Ƭ̵̬̊ but that's not actually your name as the government sees it.

Actually, Ƭ̵̬̊' changed their name (again) a long time ago -- long before they died.

That said, Once again, which specific statute says that?

You're making claims without providing evidence. Or as the (no so young any more) kids say, "pix, or it didn't happen."

No rush, I'll wait.

Sure, but moving states is a lot more common than moving countries.

> the Nordic

Long obsolete except in Iceland.

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.

Off topic, but this makes me realize one of my grandfathers was born in the 1890s, which is possibly getting rare. Time passes swiftly by. This very day your life is shorter by one and all that.

I won’t forgot when my small child clarified that I was born in 19 something not 18 something, two equally remote times to him.

On the list my middle name was listed as a name going from male to female - I think the first time I have seen anything about this name out in print in public.

Not actively used, but still see the occasional ...son on a surname.

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...

(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

they become Jay-Are

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

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

Is this regional? I’m the west coast, I never run into Jrs or 3rds.

There was quite a famous Elizabeth II.

She didn't get the suffix until her 20s. And it was not used to distinguish her from her mother (who was also a Queen Elizabeth) but from yet another Elizabeth who lived centuries earlier.

Elizabeth II was the first Elizabeth who was Queen of UK

Same with the current king Charles III of England. He is the first of that name to be king of the UK (and Canada, Australia, etc). Maybe people should revert to multiple ordinals, like James VI and I in 1603.

I don't think that's right - well, Canada and Australia ofc. The "U" in "UK" refers to James IV of Scotland becoming James of England, thus uniting the states of Albion. Charles succeeded him.

Scotland and England were not united into a single Kingdom of Great Britain until 1707 (under Queen Anne), and it did not become the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Ireland) until 1800 (under George III). So technically the "U" actually refers to union of Britain and Ireland, not England and Scotland.

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.

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