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

Posted by Chronicallybored

15 comments

  3. 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

  5. I could have sworn 2010s would have been Braden and Kayleigh

  6. What does this mean? ie these are the most popular names for both genders? Or these are names that parents called their baby boy and also baby girl or these are the names of couples or something else? Very lost here. I don’t really understand euclidian distance

  7. I’m envisioning a Netflix series, with each episode named after one of these pairs (or a series each if you wanted to stretch it). It shows their lives, and how they viewed world events as people of different ages. Each pair would have some kind of connection – siblings, childhood friends, or a couple that meet later in life. Maybe some crossovers, like one pair are the parents of the subject of a later episode.

  8. It’s funny but I think there is a certain alliteration (not sure it’s the right term) or similar phonetics in each pair? E.g. Alexandra and Zach sound kinda similar to each other, Amelia and Oliver do too to an extent etc

  10. Awesome representation. I wonder what the correlation coefficient of each is

    Im shocked that Karen and Todd didn’t appear on this chart. 🤣 Seriously, what name correlates with Karen?

  11. I know an Oliver and Amelia who are siblings, born in the 2000s

  12. With how the 2020s are going, it’s surprising how normal names are trending instead of naming kids some alien-sounding stuff like “Rizz.”

  15. Kinda funny that batman and wonder woman are Bruce and Diane.

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