Analysis of US baby names shifting between genders sparks discussion on naming trends
A data analysis showing how names like Ashley and Morgan moved from predominantly male to female usage generates debate about gendered naming patterns.
What to know
- Analysis of SSA data shows 42 names shifted toward girls and 12 toward boys, with most shifts driven by adoption increases rather than abandonment by the original gender.
- Users debate whether girls' names are inherently more dynamic or shaped by cultural traditions like naming boys after fathers or after biblical figures.
- An asymmetry emerges: women adopting traditionally male names is common, but men adopting traditionally female names occurs at notably lower rates.
- One commenter challenges the framing, arguing the article conflates rare names with trendy shifts rather than tracking genuinely popular names transitioning between genders.
The dispute Whether the article accurately characterizes name shifts: does it describe genuinely popular boys' names becoming girls' names, or conflate rare names that become trendy with true gender transitions? · positions read across 43 posts and comments
Girls' names are more dynamic because cultural traditions lock boys' names to family and biblical sources while girls' names follow fashion freely.
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“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.”
conductr · Hacker News ↗
The article overstates the transitions by treating rare, mixed-gender names as though they were dominant boys' names that shifted to girls.
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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".”
gregates · Hacker News ↗
An asymmetry exists in modern US culture where women adopt traditionally male things but men rarely adopt traditionally female things at the same rate.
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“It seems there are lots of cases across the board where "women adopt traditionally male thing" has become the norm in this timeframe but not many where "men adopt traditionally female thing" at quite the same rate or scale.”
zamadatix · Hacker News ↗
Generational age cohorts have different intuitions about name gender because they grew up with different naming conventions, making apparent shifts seem more dramatic than they are.
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“Our intuition around names is almost 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 exclusively…”
grobie12 · Hacker News ↗
NameDaisy author Data analyst / blog writer
How it unfolded 6 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlespostscomments
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Commenter argues article overstates the transitions by conflating rare names with trendy shifts
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".”
— gregates -
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…
2 more of the top 3 · 22 posts in this stretch
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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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Younger users note surprise at rapid gender shifts in names within their lifetime
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.”
— grobie12 -
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…
2 more of the top 3 · 8 posts in this stretch
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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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Pattern of women adopting traditionally male names noted while reverse rarely occurs
Commenters observe an asymmetry in naming trends: cases where women adopt traditionally male names appear common across the timeframe, but men adopting traditionally female names happen at a notably lower rate and scale.
“It seems there are lots of cases across the board where "women adopt traditionally male thing" has become the norm in this timeframe but not many where "men adopt traditionally female thing" at quite the same rate or scale.”
— zamadatix -
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…
2 more of the top 3 · 6 posts in this stretch
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> This is consistent with the observation that girl's names are more dynamic.Interesting, I wonder what causes this? In the US, is more common to name the first son after the father. Given this data comes from US social security information, that definitely has an impact.
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It seems there are lots of cases across the board where "women adopt traditionally male thing" has become the norm in this timeframe but not many where "men adopt traditionally female thing" at quite the same rate or scale.
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Commenters debate whether girls' names are inherently more dynamic or simply used differently
Users discuss linguistic and cultural explanations for why girls' names shift more frequently, with some attributing it to traditions of naming boys after fathers or using biblical names, while others observe that naming conventions allow girls' names greater freedom to follow fashion.
“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.”
— conductr -
A name I was surprised by was someone I know naming their daughter Miles/Myles, which is such a male name in my mind. It might even be based on the Latin word for soldier. It's not one I've seen used for a girl anywhere else, yet.
2 more of the top 3 · 4 posts in this stretch
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There are a few names I think are being confused. Jan, short for Janice is a female name, but Jan in Central / Eastern Europe as a form of John is masculine. Jean the female name and Jean the french male name are different.
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But Jean (English name, like Jeannie) and Jean (French form of John) are entirely different names, with different pronunciations, that happen to share the same spelling.
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Commenters note girls' names are more dynamic, driven by adoption rather than boys' abandonment
Hacker News discussion emerges with users noting that in most cases, name shifts toward girls were driven by increased adoption among girls rather than declining use among boys, and that the same pattern held in reverse.
“Of the 42 names that moved toward girls, 34 were driven mainly by an increase among girls, rather than a decline among boys.”
— billyp-rva -
My biggest WTF on this (as a foreigner) was the late Lindsey Graham. I always knew Lindsey/Lindsay as a female name.Either way, peeking through the list, seems to me names which end with a vowel are usually feminine. However, there's a caveat: names end up shortened, and over time even those get shortened.'Brit', 'Britney' for 'Brittany'.'Gerry'…
2 more of the top 3 · 3 posts in this stretch
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> Of the 42 names that moved toward girls, 34 were driven mainly by an increase among girls, rather than a decline among boys.> Surprisingly, the same pattern held in the opposite direction. Of the 12 names that moved toward boys, 9 shifted mainly because fewer girls were receiving them, rather than because more boys were. In other words…
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I feel like a lot of these can be tied to one famous person with the name causing the gender to flip.
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Data analysis published on US baby names shifting between genders
NameDaisy publishes analysis of US baby name trends showing 42 names that became more popular for girls and 12 that became more popular for boys, with data visualizations tracking the shifts over time.
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first by HN Best, 9d ago · also HN Frontpage
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What people are saying 12 voices from 1 site · best of 43 · verbatim
- Why is there an asymmetry where women adopt traditionally male names more readily than men adopt traditionally female names?
- Do these name-gender shifts occur in other cultures and countries, or is this pattern specific to the US?
- What causes the underlying shifts in the first place—is it driven by celebrity naming, changing gender roles, or something else?
- Nov 5
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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)
- Nov 3
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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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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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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…
- Nov 2
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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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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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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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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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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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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 data sounds interesting, but the visualization is so bad that I one-slopped an alternative:
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Most interesting thing that stands out to me is the number of names that appear to be what I would consider an abbreviation of a more traditional name.e.g. “Pat” is cited, but doesn’t specify whether that refers to Patricia or Patrick.