Articles
How name, address and phone data really works across countries — registries, exceptions and the mistakes we made.
58 articles
- Serbian Scores 0.0000 Against Itself: Four Ways Cross-Country Name Comparison FailsWe hold Serbian names twice — once in Cyrillic (sr_RS), once in Latin (sr_Latn_RS). Same country, same language, same names, same 1,143 given-name entries and 958 surname entries, identical weight tot…Read →
- Six of Nine Bugs Did Not ExistWe ran a planned revision of our name database. The plan had nine work items, each one a defect to fix. Six of them described defects that were not there, or work that had already been done. Not one o…Read →
- Sixty Cities, 106.9% of a Country: What Counts as a CityWe built a list of 60 Taiwanese cities with population weights. Then we added the weights up. The sum was 25,005,363. Taiwan's population is about 23.4 million. Our sixty cities contained 106.9% of th…Read →
- Spain's Statistical Office Strips Accents From Names on PurposeIf you have ever wondered why so many databases think Spaniards are called Jose, Angel and Maria, the proof fits on one screen. We downloaded the two name files that Spain's Instituto Nacional de Esta…Read →
- Street Names That No Longer Exist: Decommunization, Decolonization, and Why Address Data Goes StaleEvery address dataset carries an implicit claim: that the street it names is a street you could actually post a letter to. For much of Europe, and for several countries beyond it, that claim quietly e…Read →
- Surnames That Change With Gender: The Third Case Your Schema ForgotMost developers know two rules about surnames and gender. Either the surname inflects — Novák for a man, Nováková for his wife — or it does not, and Smith is Smith forever. Pick one per locale, ship i…Read →
- Surnames That Do Not Exist: How to Find Placeholders Inside a CensusThe 78th most common surname in the United States is DOE. It sits in the 2020 Census surname file between PETERSON at 77 and WARD at 79, with 262,774 bearers. Ten years earlier the same file series ra…Read →
- The Bug That Made Every Italian Twenty-OneLook up any Italian given name and the age that came back was between 19 and 25. Not usually. Always. Median 21, minimum 19, maximum 25, across all 3,189 names in the Italian cohort data — Giuseppe, G…Read →
- The Check That Goes Blind Exactly Where You Need ItWe have written before about tests that cannot fail(test-that-cannot-fail-mutation-check.md) — assertions satisfied by arithmetic, fixtures that erased the variation they existed to detect. Those are …Read →
- The Layer That Falls Out: Why Surname Corpora Systematically Miss the Last Fifty YearsIn Norway's national surname register, Mohamed is carried by 3,885 people. That places it at rank 99 — ahead of a great many names most people would call unremarkably Norwegian. Our Norwegian surname …Read →
- The Most Common Surname in Slovakia Is the Hungarian Word for "Croat"There are 36,772 men in Slovakia named Horváth, and 32,234 women named Horváthová. No other surname in the country comes close. The word is not Slovak. It is Hungarian, and it means "Croat." This is n…Read →
- The Most Common Surnames in 58 Countries — and Why the Top 10 Means Something Completely Different in Vietnam and ItalyIf you ask "what are the ten most common surnames in this country?", you will always get an answer. What almost nobody tells you is that the answer is worth wildly different amounts depending on where…Read →