Random Name Generator
How this works
This generates a random name. This generally used for creating placeholder data for demonstrations, testing, and other data purposes.
Technical notes:
- Names are weighted according to their relative frequency; for example, there are 4,676,131 males with the name John and 457,208 males with the name Carl, so John will be generated roughly 10 times as often as Carl.
- Given names are surnames are not pre-composed, but sampled separately and merged when the page is requested.
- Names are selected using the Mersenne Twister Random Number Generator, using the PHP function
mt_rand(). As per the PHP manual, this function produces (pseudo) random numbers four times faster than the standardrand()function. - For this particular program I adjusted weight of female names so that there's an equal chance of generating a male or female name. Male names occur about 1.5 times as often as female names in the data sample; the full count of names in this sample is 96,027,909 males to 64,404,348 females (a difference of more than 31 million). It might seem strange that there are more males given that there are more living females than males in the U.S. as of 2010 (females composing 50.9% of the total population) and that the source data had an equal number of names (100 each). See below the table for more info.
| Rank | Male Total | Female Total |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4,836,379 (James) | 3,514,032 (Mary) |
| 2 | 4,676,131 (John) | 1,565,942 (Patricia) |
| 3 | 4,626,414 (Robert) | 1,463,714 (Jennifer) |
| 98 | 312,396 (Bobby) | 332,764 (Natalie) |
| 99 | 306,644 (Johnny) | 332,205 (Abigail) |
| 100 | 305,501 (Howard) | 331,748 (Kathy) |
The most popular male names are far more common than the corresponding female names, but this trend reverses at the 66th rank (with female names being more common than the corresponding male names). This is because the most common male names are far more common than the female names of the same rank. If this were the full census of names, the total number of names would match the total number of people in the population, but this is a sample of the 100 most common names. To put it another way, the most male names "stacked toward the top" but have a steeper drop off than the female names. I would guess that there are roughly the same total number of names out there, and as you get to the more obscure names the total counts of each gender would be about even.
Interestingly, the names Bobby and Johnny are varieties of Robert and John respectively; had those names been grouped together, the difference in name frequency in the sample would be even more pronounced.
Surnames (last names)
Surnames come from the published results of the 2000 United States Census conducted by the Census Bureau (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_common_surnames_in_North_America; the original reference at https://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/freqnames2k.html is not currently available).
Given names (first names)
Given names come from data published by the Social Security Administration. These are the 100 most common male given names and 100 most common female names at birth from 1916 to 2015. I'm not sure why the SSA only reports popular names at birth, but it's probably because legal name changes are usually administered at the local or state level, not the federal level.
Varieties of the same name are listed separately; for example, the female names Julie (#54) and Julia (#80) are varieties of the same name; both derive from the Latin name Julia, feminine form of Julius.
References and More Information
- Social Security Administration: Top Names Over the Last 100 Years
- Wikipedia: List of most popular given names (worldwide, with some regional breakouts)
- Wikipedia: List of most common surnames in Asia
- Wikipedia: List of most common surnames in Europe
- Wikipedia: List of most common surnames in North America
- Wikipedia: List of most common surnames in South America