Cross-gender name pairs with the most similar usage patterns, by decade of peak popularity. By extension, the pairs of names for which individuals have the most similar age distributions in the US population.
Name pairs were chosen based on a blend of the Euclidean distance between popularity trends (expressed as a fraction of peak popularity) and the degree to which their births fell within a particular decade. I limited the sample to names with >200k births and >90% male or female births.
I also only considered pairs of names where the similarity relationship was reciprocal: for example, "Jennifer" is most similar to "Chad" and "Chad" is most similar to "Jennifer".
Full details, including all analysis and visualization code (published from Jupyter notebook): https://nameplay.org/blog/boys-and-girls-names-with-most-similar-trends
by Chronicallybored
3 Comments
data source: [Social Security Administration baby name popularity dataset](https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/limits.html)
Tools:
* Analysis: Jupyter, Python, polars, numpy
* Visualization: matplotlib, aquarel (matplotlib theming)
Full code available at https://nameplay.org/blog/boys-and-girls-names-with-most-similar-trends
Chad is the most American name ever lmao
In the UK the names Dustin, Chad, Tina and Todd are pretty much nonexistent. I wonder what similar name equivalents would be… Maybe Joyce, Margaret, Fred, Peter and Jill.
I do find it amusing though how names come back in fashion every couple of generations. But Bruce and Diane are yet to bounce back. Maybe in a few decades we’ll be welcoming baby Bruces into the world