Tuesday, February 6, 2007

How Many People Have Your Name?

Megan Smolenyak found a neat little web site - http://howmanyofme.com/search/ . At this site, you can input a First Name and a Surname, and it will tell you how many people have each name and the complete name, plus the rank of the names.

For instance, I input "Randy" and "Seaver" in the search engine, and came up with 352,463 for "Randy" (161st most popular) and 4,110 for "Seaver" (8,152nd most popular), including five who are "Randy Seaver."

The search for "Randall" "Seaver" shows 206,978 for "Randall" (305th) and 3 persons named "Randall Seaver."

Would you believe that in the database that there are:

* 1 "Elvis Presley"
* 39 "Bill Gates"
* 12 "Bill Clinton" and 258 "William Clinton"
* 1 "Hilary Clinton" and 1 "Hillary Clinton"
* 503 "George Bush"
* 0 "Newt Gingrich" or "Newton Gingrich" -- He doesn't exist?
* 0 "Barack Obama" -- What's going on?
* 0 "Mitt Romney" -- they don't like politicians?
* 0 "Rudolph Giuliani" or "Rudy Guiliani"
* 443 "John McCain"
* 11 "Joe Blow"
* 295 "John Doe"
* 47,554 "Robert Smith" -- there!
* 6 "Jesus Christ" - hmmm, who knew?
* 2 "Britney Spears"
* 2,614 "Jennifer Lopez"
* 6 "Bill O'Reilly"
* 6 "Paula Zahn"
* 640 "John Finch" -- hi John!
* 212 "Shirley Becker" - hi Shirley!
* 21 "Linda Seaver"
* 21 "Paul Leland"
* 205 "Richard Eastman"
* 0 "Leland Meitzler"
* 140 "Christopher Dunham" - but only one Genealogue!
* 10 "Craig Manson"
* 8 "Steven Danko"

You get the idea - go play with it...

I wonder where they got the information? My guess is from the 2000 census.

Note that they used only the top 90% of each type of name - if someone has a unique given name like Snorkel or a unique surname like Obama or Smolenyak then it doesn't show up in the statistics.

Hat tip to Megan for the link.

3 comments:

Drew Smith said...

No need to guess where the information came from. Their "Accuracy" link (http://howmanyofme.com/accuracy/) says that the info comes from the 1990 census, and that it is a "convenient fiction" that combines statistical info from both first and last names. That is enough to tell me that they used *this* information:
http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/freqnames.html

Then they just calculated the odds of having each part of the name, and threw them together. So it doesn't count actual people.

Craig Manson said...

Whatever the methodology, it works out just about right--10 of me, 11 of my mother!

Anonymous said...

305,968People in the U.S. have the name Rita. 204th most popular name. There are 0 people in the U.S named Clamser LOL


Rita