Ultimate Baby Naming Spreadsheet
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!
HI Guys-
I thought picking a name was complicated enough!
Now these spread sheets have tech-i-fied the process!
Here are Drew and Grace’s suggestions for their new cousin:
Grace- age 5: Barney ( our former childhood dog) or Daisy (her nintendog)
Drew-age 6: Grant (his favorite guy from Mythbusters) or Marissa (the girl in his class he likes)
Another option- Skitty (a Pokemon)
I guess your idea is better- never leave naming PEOPLE up to small children!
Love, Care
This spreadsheet is the best ive seen- well done.
The ability to see similar sounding names is what is lacking from everything else I’ve seen.
I have a spreadsheet of about 50,000 baby names- and I want to get the similar soundprints for comparison. Could you point me in the right direction- Im farily technical- I know PHP etc- but looking into Aspell was pretty overwhelimg- I couldnt pinpoint documentation on SoundPrints.
Perhaps you have a script you could share? I’d be happy to share my database of 50,000 names with you.. either way… if you are interested. My database also has orgins and name meanings.
please let me know.
me [@] kerrymann.com
Search around for an implementation of double metaphone in PHP. The wiki article on it is a good place to start. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Metaphone I haven’t looked at the code I used to generate this in a really long time, so it’s all kind of out of date and I don’t really remember how it worked, sorry.
Did you also see my page here: http://slacy.com/names where I’ve made a very simple web interface into this info? That one has both male and female lists, as well as a really big “all” list. You can find a link to that list here: http://slacy.com/names/index.php?name=robert&type=male&n=14 , but it’s not grouped by gender. Does your 50k name list separate male from female?