Younger users note surprise at rapid gender shifts in names within their lifetime
5 Nov 2 3:29 PM · 9d ago · 8 comments · 1 source · development 5 of 6
Users under 30 report being surprised that names shifted from almost exclusively male to exclusively female within their own lifetimes, and suggest this generational gap may explain why parents think they're choosing unique names when they've never met an adult with that name.
“within my lifetime (I'm under 30) names had gone from almost exclusively male to exclusively female.”
grobie12NameDaisy author Data analyst / blog writer
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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…
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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'.
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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
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The data sounds interesting, but the visualization is so bad that I one-slopped an alternative:
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> 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.
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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
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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.
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In Poland it used to be quite common to give boys "Maria" as a second name. I think it's a Catholic thing.
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