Name games (12/365)

[white_hart]

Via oracne, find out what your name would be if you were born today (or, indeed, in various decades in the past).

Apparently if I had been born today my name would be Cynthia, which seems highly unlikely. Surely no-one has named a child Cynthia since at least 1965? And my 1960s name would be Kathie, which is much more common than my actual name has even been. Then again, it says that if I'd been born in the 1970s (which I was) I'd have been Lynnette (which I'm not). Also, several of my options just seem to be variant spellings - Carrol (1940s), Hellen (1930s) and Adella (1910s).

According to this one, my name was just 40 years ahead of its time (or 74 years behind it), as it was most popular in 1900 and peaked again in 2014 (which pretty much exactly correlates with the date of birth of the child of someone in my team who has the same name as me, which is obviously deeply confusing on Teams calls when the schools are closed).

Comments

[shewhostaples]

Aaliyah. Though I have my doubts, because my name is much more common in the US than it is in the UK (among people 20 years older than me, admittedly, but still).

[white_hart]

I suppose it's the Irish connection. Though one of my great-grandmothers (not from the Irish bit of the family) had your name, too.

[clanwilliam]

My mum’s your name with a C, but in classic Irish fashion, her legal name is the English version, she just uses the Irish one. As does my dad.

[oursin]

I think that like so many of these things, it skews heavily US and I would expect UK names to be different (even by region). I think I have commented that names that I have long associated with the older members of my parents' generation seem to be coming back: it's very weird to hear them applied to tiny modern children.

[white_hart]

Boys' names in particular seem to hearken back to my grandparents' generation. (I have one colleague who has an Edmund and an Arthur, and a friend whose 4-year-old is Herbert...)

[tree_and_leaf]

Isn't this US data, in fact?

(It slightly overlooks the fact that some people give names because of family - I'm pretty sure my name would be the same whenever I was born, because my mother was determined to name me after her mother, who died when she was in her early twenties).

[cosmolinguist]

UK names and U.S. name trends seem to be in different parts of the generation cycle. My British husband was amazed to hear I had friends my own age called Seth when he thinks of it as an old man name. Whereas I can't imagine anyone older than me being called Seth.

[white_hart]

I don't think of Seth as an old man name so much as an 18th-century sort of name. So I'm not surprised by younger Seths (maybe their parents liked Cold Comfort Farm, which has a Seth among the main characters?) but I would be surprised if it was a common name at any age.

[conuly]

Likewise, I know many kids in the past two decades were named "Alfie" overseas - Americans tend to go "Oh, but ALF, people will tease him" even when you point out that ALF went off the air when were were all still in our single digits.

[ankaret]

I was trying to recall the name of a youngish American actor a while back it turned out to be Eric Balfour, and it occurred to me that to me 'Eric Balfour' conjures up images of an elderly Scotsman, probably a union man or a figure in the Attlee government.

[caulkhead]

I do, in fact, have a friend called Lynnette, born in the 1970s, but neither of us know anyone else of similar age by that name.

[white_hart]

That's not actually dissimilar to my name in terms of popularity, I just feel that as I was born in the 70s surely my 70s name should be my actual name!

[telophase]

That second one claims my name was 15 years ahead of its time, which I find odd given that I'm used to having the same name as a number of others in my age-group, and in undergrad I lived with 2 different people with the same name, albeit not at the same time. I cannot imagine how vast the field of [my name] must have been 15 years later, if that's truly the case.

[nostalgia]

Birth name: Scarlett
Legal name: Bristol

[clanwilliam]

My name was the top one in the US the year I was born, but it certainly wasn’t the top name in Ireland. This is all US data only that they’re using.

[tree_and_leaf]

Yes - mine appears to be much more common in the US than the UK (not surprising given it's a moderately common name in Germany).

[fencesitting]

It says my name would be Sawyer. Like the bloke from Lost?

[antisoppist]

I had The Guinness Book of Names when I was a teenager and it had brilliant lists of top names in the UK and the US over the centuries/decades. The US ones seemed to run about 20 years behind ours.

[redbird]

I am 100% certain that if I had been born today, my parents would not have named me Reagan.

I am also sure that they didn't look at a list of most popular names for the year and carefully pick the 100th most popular. Yes, "your parents wanted you to have a common name that people can spell" and "your parents didn't want you to be one of four Jennys in your grade school class" are things real people do, but not that level of precision.

[conuly]

Some people do. Mostly name nerds, and occasionally people who got burned the first time around, either with their own name or their first child's name.

My sister is a Jennifer. My parents neither looked at the SSA charts or visited a playground before she was born, they had just "always liked the name". Yeah, well, so did everybody else their age! When I was born they tried a little harder, named me after my grandfather. Consequently, I grew up with a name that reached its peak popularity when my parents were kids (Connie), but at least I never had to use an initial!

[girlyswot]

Janiyah. Which seems extraordinarily unlikely.

[girlyswot]

My actual name apparently peaked in 1942, which I can believe, though it’s never been super popular. Rosalind Russell may have inspired a few.

[aella_irene]

My name is too rare for a result! But using my middle name all the results were deeply unlikely.

[conuly]

It's a cute conceit, but we all know that different ethnic groups have different ideas about naming, as do different regions of the USA and different age cohorts among parents - older parents and younger parents have different name preferences.

Names that are exceedingly popular among, say, African-Americans of my generation barely hit the charts at all. Or Chinese, or Arabs, or Jews - I personally know multiple people named Aviva, and have always considered it a lovely name, but they're all Modern Orthodox and I don't think the name has any headway outside the Jewish community at all. Likewise, I also know multiple people named Afua, but again, unless you know a lot of African-Americans of my generation you probably would never have considered it for your own child.

[conuly]

And for the record, neither Aviva nor Afua have ever hit the top 1000 list: https://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager#prefix=afua&sw=both&exact=false

But Afua in particular is so pinned in place as a popular African-American name for kids of a certain age cohort that it actually shows up as a minor plot point in One Crazy Summer - the main character's mother calls her sister "Afua" instead of the name everybody else calls her, "Fern". (Our protagonist never quite believed that her mother had left them because of a disagreement over the baby's name, and to be fair, the evidence shows that it's more complicated than that - but it certainly is true that when they finally meet the woman after 7 years she still won't use the other name for the girl.)

[melita66]

My name's in the 600s for my birth year in the mid-1960s. I've met one other person with the name but run across a few others over the years. My great-aunt's middle name was the same. It was as high as the 300s in 1900. I assume it's because it was the middle name of one of Queen Victoria's offspring.

For my two kids (born 2012) we were trying for uncommon names and seem to have succeeded partially. One is in the mid-200s. The other's in the 800s, but his name is similar to two semi-popular girl's names. Oops.

[callmemadam]

I'd previously looked up my name and found it to be the fourth most popular for girls in the year I was born. This site has it as third and says that today my name would be ADA! I associate the name with great aunts.

[girlyswot]

I love Ada. It's very popular on the Mumsnet baby naming forum.

[serriadh]

I had to use my middle name and it thinks I'd be called Hazel today, which strikes me as very unlikely. (The Hazels I know skew much older.)

[fencesitting]

I know a child Hazel!

[cmcmck]

Aminah which is certainly one of the world versions of my 'real world' name, but I'd need to be of subcontinent Asian descent and I don't think my Romani ancestry counts! :o)

[lilliburlero]

This offers all sorts of delightful possibilities if your name is not the one you were given at birth: if I enter [chosen name] [year I started to use it] I am told that my 2000s equivalent is Adonis.

[white_hart]

Well, Adonis would be a nice name to have! (My 2000s name is Dayanara, which is not a name I've ever actually come across. Although I don't know many people who were born in the 2000s, so that might be why.)