Some fun name files from the US 1990 Census on name distribution.
David was the 6th most common male name, making up 2.363% of the population (17.716% of the population is made up of folks named David or one of the 5 more popular names). (People who wrote their name on the census as “Dave” were #271, adding another 0.053% of the population.) Multiply that by 290MM people, and you come up with about 6.8MM Davids out there. Woo-hoo!
Hill was the 33rd most common male name, making up 0.189% of the population (11.035% of the population is made up of folks named Hill or one of the 32 more popular names).
Marjorie was the 128th most common female name, making up 0.173% of the population (48.341% of the population is made up of folks named Marjorie or one of the 127 more popular names).
Katherine was the 61st most common female name, making up 0.313% of the population (33.489% of the population is made up of folks named Katherine or one of the 60 more popular names). (“Catherine” was #46, “Kathryn” was #82, “Katharine” was #661.)
The data is not completely rock-solid, since it is actually taken from the 1990 Post-Enumeration Survey of 377k people in 5,300 blocks to try to determine undercount. The methodology is described here (and demonstrates why doing stuff with names is deucedly difficult).
Cool stuff.
(via Volokh)
I’m number 1! I’m number 1! (And I don’t get to say that very often.)
My name. which for most of the last century was the most popular female name. has been slipping over the last few years. Glad to know we Marys are still alive.
Well, there’s some overcount here, since they decided that all the “Mary Ann,” “Mary Beth,” etc. names would just be counted as “Mary.”
But, yeah, even though there are more Ashleys being thrown into the population, there are still a lot of Marys out there.
Davids are a dime a dozen!
With half a percent of the male population, I think Scotts are under-represented in comics. Scott Summers, Scott Free and Scott Lang are the only ones I can think of.
Can’t actually come up with a David right now, though (David Bruce Banner does not count).
Well, if you’re going to do the comic book thang …
David Michelinie?
Peter David?
Oops, wrong side of the paper.
Can’t think of any (standard) comic characters named David.
WooHoo…I’m #106 at 0.186%
Neat! My first name is 89th, but my last name is 4311. Lou ends up at 75 for first, but 48th for last.
Must bookmark this page for later use for generating random names.