What people actually ask about names
Mondonomo publishes answers at 1.89 million addresses. Until now nobody here had measured the questions. We harvested 931,090 of them from 11 public communities where people talk about names, rewrote each as a self-contained question, and sorted them into 27 kinds. This page is what came back, including the two thirds we decline to answer.
These numbers count questions, not names
Two thirds of it is a recommendation
63.6% of the questions that are about names ask us to suggest, judge or rank one — 220,124 of them are straightforwardly “help me pick a name”. A name graph has no answer for that, and should not pretend to: the question is about the asker's taste, their siblings, their surname and their fear of playground nicknames, and none of that is in any register.
- subjective advice437K47.0%
- not a question about names244K26.2%
- factual — our stack should answer171K18.3%
- normative and cultural40K4.3%
- identification40K4.3%
Show as table
| Name | Questions | Note |
|---|---|---|
| subjective advice | 437,208 | 47.0% |
| not a question about names | 243,510 | 26.2% |
| factual — our stack should answer | 170,675 | 18.3% |
| normative and cultural | 40,060 | 4.3% |
| identification | 39,637 | 4.3% |
The advice we decline, in detail
- name suggestion220K50.3%
- taste opinion87K19.8%
- rate my list79K18.0%
- sibling set37K8.4%
- teasing risk15K3.4%
Show as table
| Name | Questions | Note |
|---|---|---|
| name suggestion | 220,124 | 50.3% |
| taste opinion | 86,534 | 19.8% |
| rate my list | 78,889 | 18.0% |
| sibling set | 36,813 | 8.4% |
| teasing risk | 14,848 | 3.4% |
We publish this rather than bury it. A reference work is defined as much by what it refuses to say as by what it says, and an onomastic database that answered “is this name trashy” would be answering from the taste of whoever wrote its training data.
The factual quarter, and what it wants
24.8% of onomastic questions — 170,675 of them — ask something a register or an etymology can answer. That slice is not evenly spread. One question is 29.7% of it.
- origin etymology51K29.7%
- pronunciation22K12.6%
- meaning20K11.6%
- name inventory19K11.3%
- gender association16K9.2%
- variant cognate14K8.0%
- soundalike10K6.0%
- popularity over time8.3K4.9%
- geographic distribution4.5K2.6%
- bearer count3.4K2.0%
- role disambiguation2.5K1.5%
- script transliteration8740.5%
Show as table
| Name | Questions | Note |
|---|---|---|
| origin etymology | 50,694 | 29.7% |
| pronunciation | 21,527 | 12.6% |
| meaning | 19,792 | 11.6% |
| name inventory | 19,306 | 11.3% |
| gender association | 15,766 | 9.2% |
| variant cognate | 13,722 | 8.0% |
| soundalike | 10,246 | 6.0% |
| popularity over time | 8,344 | 4.9% |
| geographic distribution | 4,520 | 2.6% |
| bearer count | 3,381 | 2.0% |
| role disambiguation | 2,503 | 1.5% |
| script transliteration | 874 | 0.5% |
| Question | What it asks | Questions | Share of factual |
|---|---|---|---|
| origin etymology | Where does this name come from; what language/tradition is it from. | 50,694 | 29.7% |
| pronunciation | How is this name pronounced. | 21,527 | 12.6% |
| meaning | What does the name mean as a word or a name. | 19,792 | 11.6% |
| name inventory | Which names have a stated objective property — a language, a tradition, a script, an initial, a meaning. | 19,306 | 11.3% |
| gender association | Is this a man's or a woman's name, and where. | 15,766 | 9.2% |
| variant cognate | Are these two names the same name; what is the equivalent in another language or tradition; what is the masculine or feminine counterpart. Short forms and nicknames are A.diminutive; which spelling is standard is A.orthography. | 13,722 | 8.0% |
| soundalike | What names sound like / look like this one. | 10,246 | 6.0% |
| popularity over time | When was this name popular; is it rising or falling. | 8,344 | 4.9% |
| geographic distribution | Where in the world is this name borne; which country is it from. | 4,520 | 2.6% |
| bearer count | How many people have this name. | 3,381 | 2.0% |
| role disambiguation | Is this a forename, a surname, a patronymic; which part is which. | 2,503 | 1.5% |
| script transliteration | How is this name written in another script; how is a foreign spelling romanised. | 874 | 0.5% |
What we led with, and what was asked
Our name pages open with how many people bear a name and which countries hold them. Those are 2.0% and 2.6% of factual demand — the two smallest topics of any size, and between them they had three of the seven slots in the page's question list. Where a name comes from, which is 29.7% of it, had none.
That measurement changed the pages rather than sitting in a report: every name page now orders its answers by what is asked about that particular name, and opens the two questions it never had — where the name comes from, and what else it is called. The ordering is the only thing this corpus is allowed to touch. No answer on any name page is written from it, and no count from it is printed anywhere.
The 103,467 names people asked about
Ranked by how often a factual question named them. This is not a popularity list — it is a list of what people wanted to look up, which is a different and rarer thing to know.
- 1James769
- 2Elizabeth679
- 3Olivia677
- 4Charlotte631
- 5Henry627
- 6Emma618
- 7John575
- 8William572
- 9Oliver553
- 10Amelia530
- 11Leo526
- 12Noah518
- 13Anna478
- 14Sophia468
- 15Jack466
- 16Lily444
- 17Alexander440
- 18Isla440
- 19Rowan439
- 20Michael438
- 21Theodore438
- 22Evelyn437
- 23Emily437
- 24Alice432
- 25Liam431
- 26Charlie426
- 27Mary423
- 28Eleanor418
- 29Violet417
- 30Rose411
How this was measured
Public posts from 11 communities, fetched through an archival API under its published rate limit, stripped of anything identifying, and read once each by a language model that was asked to write out the question being asked. The raw posts never leave the machine they were fetched to, and no sentence from one appears on this site — every on-site string is checked against the whole corpus for overlap before it ships. The sorting was checked against a 500-question slice labelled independently twice, which agreed κ 0.83; the corpus itself carries taxonomy 1.2 labels.
What this cannot tell you: forums are not the public. The people who post in a naming community skew young, English-speaking and expecting a baby, and a question nobody thinks to ask a forum — because a search engine already answers it — is invisible here. Read it as demand that reached a forum, not as demand.
See also how our numbers are made and the source registry — neither of which this page contributes to.