How your name reveals your age, sex, nationality, social status, religion…

What’s in a name? Quite a lot, it turns out. Researchers are working out how to extract data such as ya sex, nationality, age and even ya social and economic status by looking at nothing but yer name.

This week, Stasinos “King” Konstantopoulos at the National Center for Scientific Research in Athens, Greece gives us a curious glimpse into the kind of techniques that he and others are using.

He starts with a crazy game for ya’ll. Given a list of 15,00 names of people from 13 European countries, how accurately could you identify the nationality of each person?

Humans experienced in this art can reach accuracies of 43 per cent (them long winter evenings must fly by). But King Kon has developed some software that does the job just as well by looking at the length of the names and the types and frequency of accent marks used in each language. Turns out the number and types of accents in your name and its length is a pretty good signature of your nationality.

King Kon then says that since the popularity of names changes with time, he can get a reasonable idea of a person’s age–there ain’t many Hildas in the under-80s age group for example. Sex identification is usually straightforward in most languages. Names also give social and economic status clues. King Kon says look at the example of Paddy versus Patrick III. He also says some idea of a person’s religious and cultural background might also slip out: “Rene Antonius Maria Eijkelkamp and Abdelhali Chaiat are both Dutch football players, but certain educated guesses can be made about their cultural back grounds from their names alone.”

So if yer ain’t adopted a pseudonym already, better get one quick. By any other name, ya’ll bound to smell as sweet.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0710.1481 :What’s in a Name?

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