more on the alphabet distribution over the genders

[aryanhwy]

The phenomenon that I noted some weeks back, namely that in many datasets (having roughly equal numbers of boy's names and girl's names) sorted alphabetically it's possible to draw a line such that the majority of the women's names are on one side and the majority of men's on the other, has evidence in contemporary naming practices too. Joel just pointed me towards this article, and while they do say some moderately silly things (such as "Girls' names are more diverse than ever" -- not really. The feminine name pool has always been more diverse than the masculine. It could very well be that girls' names are more diverse than they have been in the 20th C, but that's not the same as "ever"), but, on the basis of last year's social security baby name data, they comment:

Similarly, the most popular first letter for boys; names is J, as it was for much of the 20th century. The most popular first letter for girls is the once-obscure A, thanks partly to rising names like Avery, Arianna and Ava.

Which is in line with the phenomenon that I've noticed.

Comments

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

Did you see my post on names the other week?
http://eliskimo.livejournal.com/371492.html
I was looking at final letters rather than initial letters.

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

I did -- very interesting to note. My sister's boys follow the pattern, Owen and Reuben. The girls also follow a pattern that I bet is pretty common among feminine names, namely ending in -a(h) (Leah and Rinnah). Before Reu was born, Andrea even asked me if I could send her a list of girl's names that were four letters long and ended in \ah\, as they wanted to try to keep the trend going. (Joel wrote me a nifty perl script to search over my names directories and I came up with all sorts of options. For some reason, things like Data, a lovely medieval Italian name, just didn't appeal to her...).