Distractions

via Richelle Mead‘s blog, two cool toys for playing with names. Most awesome is the NameVoyager, which lets you query a name’s popularity over the decades. It’s cool how my mother’s name peaked in popularity in the 1940s while my sister’s name peaked in popularity in the 1970s. The popularity of my brother’s name has been dropping since the 1880s, with an occassional smaller rise in the 1950s. Our statistics are more complicated than that because we’re Israelis, and I think my brother’s bilingual name had some more popularity here.

There’s also nymbler, which recommends names based on “inspirations”.Plug in my name (which is too obscure for any name database), and it will recommend assorted rare and special names, mostly starting with “D”. Plug in common names, and you’ll get common names as recommendations.

Also, here’s something that shows you how common surnames are in various countries, the worldnames public profiler (not that great a name for an app; barefoot shoemaker and all). Using this, I learned that Dimet is most frequent in France and Sweden. Go figure.