What's in a name?
Names, names, names. You're born with them and then pretty much stuck with them for the rest of your life so you're either thanking your parents or resenting them. But were your parents really original with your name? Did they just go with the trends of the time and choose something popular? Or maybe they had no idea if you would be a boy or girl and chose a nice gender-neutral-right-down-the-middle kind of name? Let's take a quick look.
Google BigQuery is a stats/data warehouse that contains an unfathomable amount of information and among the countless datasets is one that contains data surrounding number of applicants for SSN by year since 1914. Needless to say, we'll find most of what we need here.
To start off a quick and dirty little analysis, a quick check on the rows reveals that about 308,157,593 names have been registered over the years. Data is restricted to that in which the DOB, state of birth and name is known and the name is at least two characters long (seriously, who name's their child something like "Q" anyways?). Of these, 160,077,860 were male and the remaining 148,079,733 were female. Of all the males recoded, there were 13,656 unique names whereas there were 20,669 unique female names.
The 15 top most common male names since 1914 were as follows:
James
John
Robert
Michael
William
David
Richard
Joseph
Charles
Thomas
Christopher
Daniel
Matthew
Anthony
Donald
For females, the top 15 most common were:
Mary
Patricia
Elizabeth
Jennifer
Linda
Barbara
Margaret
Susan
Dorothy
Jessica
Sarah
Nancy
Betty
Karen
Lisa
The above heat map shows the most popular names above and the number of individuals with that name in each decade. It becomes decently apparent that certain names become popular in certain years and then fade away while others rise in popularity. The much more distinct clusters in the female heat map supports the suggestion that names come and go in popularity whereas many of the male names stay in popularity throughout the years.
You ever hear a name and you just think to yourself "Wow, that sounds like an old person name?" Well there might just be some truth to that. It might very well be that a certain name was very popular during an era and has fallen out of favor since and as a result most people we know with that given name tend to be from a certain generation or decade. I mean, no offense to all of you out there but "Margaret" kind of has that old-time feel to it. Interestingly enough, just looking at the list of names above, it feels like many of the male names have a very classic ring to it that but are still widely used today whereas some of the female names definitely seemed to have fallen in popularity (can't say I know too many Dorothy's, Betty's or Margaret's).
To create the above graphs, I took the dataset and filtered on names that appeared at least 100,000 times in history (arbitrarily chosen but I didn't want some flavor-of-the-month name from 1915 to skew the data) and then took the weighted average of the number of occurrences of that name in the year and the age (as determined by current date minus year of birth). Additionally I had to split the data out by gender as there were quite a few names that are vastly more popular with one gender but had a few occurrences many years ago (I'm looking at you, the 5 or so male "Florences" from 1914). Take it as you will at least for me the graph seems to line up with my gut feeling of "old" names. The shape of the graph is also something interesting to note; the graph for the male names is much smoother than the one for the female names. Basically, it seems to support the idea that many of the female names were popular in a certain era before fading in popularity. We see this in what almost looks like distinct chunks of popularity (i.e. Helen to Barbara before a drop in age to Anna).
Lastly, on the note of the random male "Florences'" out there, what kind of names are most gender neutral? To approach this problem, I aggregated the data by name and split by gender to calculate a ratio of male to female for a given name. Unsurprisingly, for many names like Elizabeth or Thomas, they are almost entirely skewed to one gender or another. But what about names like Skyler, Taylor, or Jaime?
To do this, I filtered the dataset to keep names that had ratios of 35/65 or closer. When I used a more aggressive ratio like 45/55 or closer, I mostly pulled back very obscure names that didn't provide good insight into the split between male and females. After doing this, the top 10 most popular names that had a split between 35/65 or closer were as follows:
Jessie
Riley
Casey
Jackie
Peyton
Jaime
Kerry
Frankie
Pat
Skyler
What's even more interesting is how the split between the popularity of a given name between males and females changed over time. In the graphs below, we see that a name like Jessie used to be much more common for females (~1915- ~1945) before a period where there were slightly more males with the name (~1945 - 1980) before finally entering a period (1980s and onwards) where the ratio is roughly the same. Other names had huge spikes in popularity. Jackie is a prime example where an enormous spike in females is observed around 1955-1965 presumably because of Jackie Kennedy. Similarly, the name Jaime saw an enormous spike for females in the early 1980s though I still don't know what this correlates to (please feel free to provide some insight in the comments if you have some).
1 - Jessie
And finally, how has the top 10 most common names in a 5 year window changed. For each gender, I compared the top 10 most common names in a window that was 1915-1920 vs 2013-2018. In the below, the outer bullet is the name and rank from 1915-1920 and the inner bullet is equivalent ranked name from the 2013-2018 window.
Male:
John
Noah
William
Liam
James
Mason
Robert
William
Joseph
Jacob
George
Ethan
Charles
Michael
Edward
James
Frank
Alexander
Thomas
Benjamin
Female:
Mary
Emma
Helen
Olivia
Dorothy
Sophia
Margaret
Isabella
Ruth
Ava
Mildred
Mia
Anna
Abigail
Elizabeth
Emily
Frances
Charlotte
Virginia
Harper
One interesting tidbit I noticed was that the most popular male name, Noah, in recent years had 94,548 individuals while the tenth most popular, Benjamin, had 69,338. However, for females the most popular name, Emma, had 101,504 named so and the tenth most popular, Harper, only had 49,398. This just further emphasizes the divide in female name popularity and how their names experience spikes in popularity.
It's quite fascinating to see the trends and history behind such an important part of our identity. It's also fun to see if your parents went with the flow and chose a popular name or if they picked a name as a result of a certain celebrity of influential figure becoming popular. In any case, names have evolved a lot over the years (particularly for females) and I'm excited to see how the landscape changes in the next few decades.
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