Slacy’s Blog

In our long and exhausting name searching process, I scraped and correlated a bunch of data (top 1000 names from 1880’s through 2000’s) from the social security website to try and find some “good” names. I also ran the names through a sound comparison algorithm (aspell soundslike) to generate a soundprint thats useful for grouping together names that sound the same. And, I put all the data in a nice .csv file so you can open it with your favorite spreadsheet program. Here’s a quick description of the columns and why you might want to sort by them:

Column A: “boy” or “girl”
Column B: The actual name.
Column C: The length (in characters) of the soundprint. This is roughly equivalent to the number of syllables of the name, or how long the name sounds.
Column D: The soundprint, forward. Sort by this to group together all names that start with the same sound.
Column E: The soundprint, backward. Sort by this to group together all names that *end* with the same sound.
Columns F-R: Name popularity (percent of people with this name) for decades 1880 through 2000.

There are 5201 names in the list, with 1320 distinct soundprints.

So, I now present you with The Ultimate Baby Naming Spreadsheet and the The Ultimate Baby Name List Correlated by Sound. Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 8:45 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.