Commenter argues article overstates the transitions by conflating rare names with trendy shifts
6 Nov 2 5:37 PM · 9d ago · 1 post · 10 comments · 2 sources · development 6 of 6
A detailed comment challenges the framing, noting that most cases represent names moving from rare-and-mixed usage to suddenly trendy for girls, not from genuinely popular boys' names. Ashley is cited as an example: rare for both genders before 1960, it then ramped up dramatically for girls (927 in 1970, peaking at 54,856 in 1987) while also increasing for boys but to a much lower peak (746 in 1980).
“This article misleads by presenting these transitions as from "popular boys name" to "popular girls name", when in fact most of the cases here are from "rare name, sometimes used for boys and sometimes girls" to "suddenly trendy for girls".”
gregatesNameDaisy author Data analyst / blog writer
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This article misleads by presenting these transitions as from "popular boys name" to "popular girls name", when in fact most of the cases here are from "rare name, sometimes used for boys and sometimes girls" to "suddenly trendy for girls".To take Ashley as an example. This name suddenly started ramping up in popularity in the 60s. In 1970, there…
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Only somewhat related but my parents named me a fairly common, if niche in America, name. But they declared it to be pronounced like another common name. For example, naming me Joan but having it pronounced Jane. They claimed that it was some Old World way to pronounce it that they found in a book.I grew up not thinking about it much (it's my…
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Not sure if this is universal, but when my wife and I were thinking about naming our son, we observed that in Spain there seems to be much more variety of girl than boy names.In fact, you can almost prove it by bijective mapping to a subset. Almost all typical boy names have a feminine version (Juan->Juana, Carlos->Carla/Carlota, Manuel->Manuela…
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Surprised Madison isn't on there as a boy name that became a girl name. It was a traditionally male surname (eg Madison, Wisconsin, the state capital, was named after James Madison) until the 1984 movie Splash, where a woman has to make up a name, looks around, sees a street sign for Madison Avenue, and says her name is "Madison". That was…
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I'm French and my son's name is Camille. It was exclusively a masculine name until the 19th century (Camille Pissarro, Camille Desmoulins, etc.) then gradually became feminine. By the 80s and 90s, it was overwhelmingly used for girls, but now it's pretty evenly split again, with boys starting to slightly outnumber girls. What i find fascinating is…
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It has been my experience as a long-time worker with youth groups that the recent trend for gen-alpha girls names is to bring back Victorian-era names (Blanche, Pearl, Gertrude, etc) and for boys new names have been coined indicating testosterone or aggression (Trucker, Hunter, Killer, Fleshrenderer -- okay, maybe I made that last one up). One…
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Names, appearance, gender-related behavior is generally more fluid for females in America currently.A different somewhat topic-related comment: I have a friend named Darakshan -- he took up his Sufi name (his birth name was David). Darakshan is generally considered a female name in Persian-Urdu culture -- I don't know whether he and his American…
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While I've never met anyone named Jody, it was a common nickname decades past in the US Army for the guy who your girl is cheating with while you're deployed. I'm surprised to see it was considered a female name in the time I would have expected it to be more definitely male, given that context.Looking it up, it appears that the original name was…
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I was thinking about this in terms of products recently. Gendered products tend to move from men to women, but rarely the other way around. High heels, Chuck Taylors, motorcycles, etc.Some products do move the other way but it is a slow process: massages, wet wipes (Dude Wipes anyone?), manicures, etc. But I think a good majority of products…
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Wonderful little bit of data analysis. I appreciate that the data visualisations let us see the answer from just a scan, no reading required (except the legend to make sense of the colours).Tangent: I assumed this was a clever piece of marketing for an underlying company, but looks like 'NameDaisy' is purely a personal project (as opposed to a…
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Coulmont, a French researcher, is publishing a yearly report on first name statistics, including that kind of gender switch:https://coulmont.com/varia/2026/2026-prenoms-rapport.pdf (pages 9-10)
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Sometimes, I imagine starting a fully remote, distributed, company, where every employee - including myself - adopts a gender neutral name.Initially, I thought only a small number of names would be available, but reports like this suggest the options are vast and ever shifting.
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In a rural area I visit frequently there is a couple in their 70s who run their own greenhouse selling flowers. One goes by Gene/Jean/Jeanne, and the other is Fran and I always get them mixed up because the names can be used interchangeably for either sex.
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The shift that seems the weirdest to me is "Anne" shifting from a male name to a female name. This happened long before the US was formed, but it always surprises me when I read about a renaissance soldier named Anne.
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Is this site referring to global or US trends? I don't see it mentionned anywhere.All the Leslie I know are men for instance, so I have a feeling this balance might be purely regional but what do I know.
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> girl's names are more dynamicThe linguist in me can't decide if girl names are more dynamic (there are more options) or less dynamic (they don't get used for boys as often).
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Funny how this is country specific. Some of these would still be very unusual to have changed in the U.K… Ashley in particular, I’ve seen it as a girl’s name but only rarely here.
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I read a stat that the next generation is 30% less than the previous one. Nobody is having kids. It is norms, not monetary things. So many had kids in dire situations.
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This is kind of gibberish without seeing the name frequency alongside the swing. It's much more likely to see a swing with an infrequent name than a common one.
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I like how "Pat" moved to "Insufficient data" right about when SNL started running their "Pat" skits.
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Maybe we can finally stop gendering names. Like… is your handle a “boy” handle or a “girl” handle?
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>McKinleyI find it all the more disturbing that a patronymic surname has become a forename.
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