Sources and method
Three data sets carry this whole site. All three are free to use — two are public domain and one is BSD-licensed — so nothing here depends on a licence that could be withdrawn.
U.S. Census Bureau — 2020 name tabulations
- What it gives us
- How many people carry each name: 923 first names and 777 surnames, with rank, share per 100,000, the split between men and women, and how bearers answered the census categories.
- What it does not
- Years of birth. The census is one snapshot, so it can say how many people carry a name today and nothing at all about when they were born. Names below a hundred people are not published, and neither are they here.
- Terms
- A work of the federal government: no copyright, no licence, no conditions. The Bureau asks to be named as the source of the underlying data for any estimates built on it, which is what the block at the foot of every page does.
CMU Pronouncing Dictionary — Carnegie Mellon University
- What it gives us
- How a name is said, phoneme by phoneme. From that we count syllables, find where the stress falls, group names that end on the same sound, and check which first names collide with a surname.
- What it does not
- Cover every name. It is a dictionary of American English, so rarer names have no entry — where that happens the pronunciation block simply does not appear rather than guessing.
- Terms
- A two-clause BSD licence: free for any use, commercial included, on condition the copyright notice travels with the data. No share-alike, no restrictions on what is built with it.
Charlotte Yonge — History of Christian Names, 1884
- What it gives us
- Where a name comes from and what its root means, and — because the glossary groups every form of a name in one place — the shapes it takes in other languages.
- What it does not
- Anything coined after 1884. The book covers the European Christian tradition thoroughly and nothing outside it, so many names on this site have no origin block at all. Some of its etymologies have since been revised; we give one reading and say whose it is.
- Terms
- Copyright long expired. Public domain, no conditions of any kind — we credit it because a reader deserves to know how old the scholarship is.
Two rules we hold to
Nothing below a hundred people gets a number. That is the threshold the Census Bureau applies to us, and we pass it on: at finer resolution a count stops describing a crowd and starts describing a person.
Where a source is silent, so are we. An empty block is better than an invented one, so a name with no pronunciation on file shows no pronunciation, and a name with no recorded origin shows no origin.
Not affiliated with, nor endorsed by, any government agency or university.