alt Hacker NewsUS boy names that became girl names and vice versa
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> Of the 42 names that moved toward girls, 34 were driven mainly by an increase among girls, rather than a decline among boys.
> Surprisingly, the same pattern held in the opposite direction. Of the 12 names that moved toward boys, 9 shifted mainly because fewer girls were receiving them, rather than because more boys were. In other words, whichever way a name moved, the biggest change usually came from girls.
This is consistent with the observation that girl's names are more dynamic.
There are a few names I think are being confused. Jan, short for Janice is a female name, but Jan in Central / Eastern Europe as a form of John is masculine. Jean the female name and Jean the french male name are different.
My biggest WTF on this (as a foreigner) was the late Lindsey Graham. I always knew Lindsey/Lindsay as a female name.
Either way, peeking through the list, seems to me names which end with a vowel are usually feminine. However, there's a caveat: names end up shortened, and over time even those get shortened.
'Brit', 'Britney' for 'Brittany'.
'Gerry' or 'Geri' or 'Ger' for 'Gareth' (Dutch variant: 'Gerrit'),
'Pat', 'Patty' for 'Patrick', 'Patricia'.
'Pen', 'Penny' for 'Penelope'
'Ash' for 'Ashley'.
'Tash' or 'Tasha' for 'Natasha', 'Nata(s)cha' (a variant of Nathan/Nathaniel?)
'Toni', 'Tony', or 'Ton' for 'Antonia', 'Anton', or 'Antonius'.
Skimming through the quick examples I came up with, one thing stands out: if it ends with an 'a', feminine. I believe this stems from Latin? It also appears Brittany is a very British example, whereas say 'Tony' stems from a Catholic background. People with that background get very traditional names, but they're always practically shortened. Annoyingly, you'd have to mention your complete name on say a form, but otherwise you get a wider choice since you have like three names, and they're relatively long so more variety to pick from.
There was a guy at my school named Hilary who got awful abuse for it. Always wondered why parents would do such a thing to a child.
"Avery" is hardcoded in my brain as a boy's name because of the magnificent, mindbendingly heartrending Decemberists song.
I am not sure what to make of this, but the names there are ones that sound very American to me.
However the most popular names in the US are not that different from those in the UK, with few of the girls' names sounding American or unusual: https://namedaisy.com/blog/us-vs-uk-top-100-baby-names-2025 and not that many of the boys'.
But Jean (English name, like Jeannie) and Jean (French form of John) are entirely different names, with different pronunciations, that happen to share the same spelling.
Would be interesting to see if this happens in other cultures/other regions of the world.
Would also be interesting to see why these shifts ever occurred in the first place and why there's a greater move "towards girls" for most of the names.
I'm sure that in itself would be full of revelations
A name I was surprised by was someone I know naming their daughter Miles/Myles, which is such a male name in my mind. It might even be based on the Latin word for soldier. It's not one I've seen used for a girl anywhere else, yet.
I feel like a lot of these can be tied to one famous person with the name causing the gender to flip.
Nice!
I find it interesting that many names I grew up associating to a gender can be genderless, these examples are usually girl names in Mexico: Yuri, Carmen, Karen
This reminds of of this tool [1]. It's a wasm that shows "overrepresented baby names". Choose a state, choose a time frame, it will tell you which names were given more in that state compared to all other states. Ever heard of an "Alaska Name" or an "Idaho Name"... find them with this tool.
[1] https://docs.malloydata.dev/malloyyo-babynames/over-represen...
I've noticed more girls are being named Parker these days. My 1yo son is named Parker. He's holding the line.
I'm surprised Ryan wasn't on the list. Traditionally a boys name, but I know at least 3 women named Ryan. Maybe it hasn't reached a tipping point yet.
Just a data point from the SFBA ...
There are a lot of Ronins. Lots.
Sometime 8-12 years ago, dads in Marin got a glint in their eye:
"My son ... the wayward samurai ..."
The data sounds interesting, but the visualization is so bad that I one-slopped an alternative: https://www.alwaysleaveanote.com/gender-swapping-names/
Most interesting thing that stands out to me is the number of names that appear to be what I would consider an abbreviation of a more traditional name.
e.g. “Pat” is cited, but doesn’t specify whether that refers to Patricia or Patrick.
My brother was named Morgan in 1988. I think he's the only male Morgan he knows, but often had class with girls of the same name.
I was very much shocked to see a feminine version of my name used IIRC on Dead Or Alive 4 (DOA4), not knowing the backstory: I think it was a character called Leon was promising to avenge his dead girlfriend, Rolande.
I've wondered if the women that have carried the name have liked it? In my mind, it's always sounded very blunt so as to be feminine, but I recognize I'm heavily biased when it comes to my own name.
Most surprising was "Mario" becoming shared. "Maria/Mario" seemed inherently gendered, based on the last letter.
I’d be curious if men with female names get rejected out of a lot of job interviews since the employer may have thought they chose a female for DEI and then a man shows up?
Or maybe it’s a good way to get your foot in the door in todays job market.
Surprised Sue wasn't mentioned. I had heard that boys had started being called Sue (sample size of 1, but very prominent).
I'm just really surprised that 21% of Lynn's are boys.
Most of the names that flip over seem to be names associated with the gentry class, many of the names seem to be neutral, soft very inoffensive names.
It's super hard to keep track of, I have an app that's designed to help couples name their baby, and I always wanted to stay away from hard-defined gender stuff, but people still want boy/girl categories. So many are both, but to varying degrees. I ended up using a boy/girl/unisex selector, and had Jev tag all the names. It's especially when dealing with other countries, languages, and customs. At the end of the day, it's mostly easier for the user to just swipe left on a name rather than try to pre-eliminate it from their pool.
Missing: Shannon and Ryan.
I'm gonna credit George RR Martin with flipping Arya in the mid '90s
Good luck to the Perl function Text::GenderFromName()
Maybe it needs the birthday
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Super informative article.
Sort of reminds me of the color swap of Pink and Blue for Men and Women.
Surprised to not see "Jordan" in there, it's the first one that came to my mind.
Green to orange? Why not blue to pink? I know it is stereotypical, but it is the natural colouring.
As someone who doesn't have kids yet and so doesn't meet a lot of new borns I found the names on this super surprising. Our intuition around names is almsot exclusively formed by our own age group and people older than us. For many of this it was shocking to me that within my lifetime (I'm under 30) names had gone from almost exclusively male to exclusively female. I guess this is why you end up with so many parents all choosing the same small set of names each believing they are choosing a unique name because they've never met an adult with that name.