Years ago I remember listening to the audio book version of Freakonomics and the in particular the story about baby names (I think a standalone podcast episode can be found here). Being a teacher this has sort of stuck with my over time, since every year I get another crop of student names, some with interesting new spellings of older names, some with identical pronunciations to familiar names that I have to double check, and some I have to embarras myself a few times to get right (even with help from students, because my brain is only sometimes connected to my mouth).
I’ve had a note in my projects folder for quite a while to have a look at baby names over the years and see how things like phonetic variations get introduced, but, well, that folder is pretty crowded for a reason. But the folder also exists for a reason and that reason is: “I don’t want to do this other thing! Halp!”
So…
Let’s go on a Name Lineage Adventure!
Is it rigorous? So much no.
Do all of the phonetic drifts make sense? No.
Can I choose a starting name? Also no.
Does it make distinctions between male and female names? Not really.
But it’s kinda fun.
I started with Australian data, but the sources are pretty varied and not as fine grained as I would have liked, so more serious analysis went out the window in favour of volume. This is drawn from some Australian sources, UK and Wales, and US, with some fairly varied coverage so there are some spots where names just peter out.
The version here all runs client side, so it has a drastically reduced set of names so that it can just pull down and decompress its data source. Hitting the new adventure button a bunch to try and find a name that doesn’t just sit there for 100 years didn’t seem like much fun. There’s a more serious looking dashboard with the complete data set too, but I need to make more accessible and frankly less boring before that one sees the light of day.