When you’re introduced to a little baby Bailey, what gender do you assume? What colour jumpsuit do you buy for a little Robin? and how should you address an unknown Morgan by email? In a world where gender neutral names are becoming more popular, and the lines between traditionally male and female names are becoming blurred, Geoff Peters’ Baby Name Guesser was designed to answer these and other vexing questions.

This fun little tool helps you find names based on their gender and popularity. The interesting thing is that for the Baby Name Guesser, gender isn’t a simple binary affair. Rather, you can search for names which are relatively “more masculine” or ”more feminine” based on the statistical probabilities derived from analysing the usage of the name throughout the internet. Exactly how this works I’m not too sure, and the tool often gives some curious results; so it turns out that the gender identity of names, often isn’t as black and white as you might have thought.

It will also show you names with similar statistical profiles. For example, according to the guesser: Alexander, Anderson, Murphy and Campbell are pretty much equally masculine (and about equally popular). There are almost three times as many boys named James as there are girls (making the name about 75% male, if I’m not mistaken). Some other interesting ratios include Hayley (82.1% Female), Ashley (77% Female), Adrian (90% Male) and Morgan (69% Male). Sue remains most definitely feminine at 98%. The most gender neutral names apparently include Bailey, Page, Robin and Paul(!?), all of which have ratios approaching 1.

The big surprise for me is how many exceptions there are for traditionally gender-specific names. For example, apparently, about 1 in 6 Josephs are girls. According to Baby Name Guesser, Henrietta is the most feminine name and Yashwant the most masculine (never met a girl called Yashwant, have you?).

Which names do you feel are the most characteristically male,  female, or gender neutral?

The universe is pregnant with invisible beauty waiting to be uncovered. Creative visualisation of abstract data reveals the innate beauty which permeates every aspect of our world. From the “poetry of logarithms” to the names we give our children…

I recently stumbled across Wordle: an online toy for generating beautiful “word clouds”. If you’re familiar with a tag cloud, you’re understand Wordle. Wordle was designed to be a way to visualise the semantic content of texts, giving greater prominence to words appearing more frequently. It’s been used to visualise everything from blogs to presidential speeches.

I thought it would be interesting to use Wordle to visualise the popularity of baby names using records from the Social Security Administration. With a dash of custom programming to tie it all together, hey presto: baby name word clouds.

These images visualise the popularity of the top 500 names for boys and girls based on the SSA’s data for 2007.

There are some interesting insights to be gleaned from comparing the images. For example, you will probably notice more definitive standouts among the girl names than the boys. That’s because the popularity of the top girls names is more concentrated around the top 10 names than is that of the boys names.

Our new baby name search engine was just released. You can use it to search for names based on recent and historical popularity, as well as many other attributes such as rhythmic stress patterns and associations. Check it out.