All about Popmundo first names

In Popmundo, my latest baby character was born yesterday. She got the name Io Anikonis. Io comes from Greek mythology and I think it’s a very pretty little name, despite whatever drama the original Io may have had to endure in her lifetime.

When picking a name for a character, I usually go the statistical route instead of just picking a name that “feels good”. First and foremost, I want uniqueness in my name. I’ve published lists of most top 50 common names in Popmundo so I know which names to avoid. Those name are usually very common outside Popmundo too. Classic old biblical and other religious names that have rooted themselves in society. You can hardly ever go wrong with one of those. Safe, plain old and boring!

Other than getting a unique name, I prefer names with as few accents (diacritics) as possible. This ensures I can type that name (in blogs, chats etc.) on my keyboard without too much effort. A short name is also to be preferred, they are usually easier to read out loud, and heck, after 10 Popmundo babies, remembering a name can become difficult as it is ;) I don’t usually make up nicknames for the kids anyway. Only nicknamed child is Mango, and his full name was picked from the Arabic lists, Mangoosh.

Today I assembled a list of all the current girl and boy names. Oddly enough, I couldn’t find the name Io in the Ellinika (Greek) list as I had hoped to, but she could be found in the Japanese list. Also the other name I had dabbled with, Deirdre, was nowhere to be found! Looking at the imbalance in the number of names in each gender makes me wonder if my list is somehow incomplete.

38,751 total names of which 23,964 names are male, 14,787 are female.

Out of these, if we ignore what language they belong to, there are 17,815 unique male names, 10,153 unique female names. 601 names are unisex names, meaning it exists in both genders (I’ll publish the names at the end of this blog.)

There are 32 unique names which are 2 letters long, 504 have 3 letters, 2,326 names have 4 letters, 5,288 names has 5 letters.

Some of the longer names you can find are:
mysql> select distinct name, gender, lang from names order by char_length(name) desc limit 20;
+----------------------+--------+------------+
| name                 | gender | lang       |
+----------------------+--------+------------+
| Andreas Jörg Eduard  |      1 | Deutsch    |
| Muhammad Hairulnizam |      1 | Malay      |
| Jonas Petras Antanas |      1 | Lietuvių   |
| Divyagovrsabhadhvaja |      1 | Hindi      |
| Maria da Conceição   |      0 | Português  |
| Herrmann Maximillian |      1 | Deutsch    |
| Adhiveeraramapondian |      1 | Hindi      |
| Abu-Khuzaymah-Ilban- |      1 | Arabic     |
| Nikolaus Maximillian |      1 | Deutsch    |
| Abu-'Abdullah-Muhamm |      1 | Arabic     |
| Iskandar Zulkernain  |      1 | Malay      |
| Ahmad Shahrul Azhar  |      1 | Malay      |
----------------------------------------------

I have no way to tell if they are real and common names in any of their respective countries. But that’s why we have our translators to do the work for us.

There’s certainly a lot more things I can do with this database I’ve gathered. As I come up with more interesting applications, I’ll be sure to post an entry about it!

Meanwhile you can just browse the current database of names in Popmundo namesearch.