Articles
How name, address and phone data really works across countries — registries, exceptions and the mistakes we made.
58 articles
- The Patronymic Rule Everyone States WrongRussian civil registry offices publish the rule for building a patronymic. Here is the clause that decides between -ьевич and -иевич, as it appears on a regional registry office's own website: The и t…Read →
- The Patronymic: The Field 52 Countries Don't HaveWe audited the patronymic across 64 locales. The field carries information in 12 of them. In the other 52 the only honest value is an empty string. That ratio is not the interesting part. The interest…Read →
- The Privacy Threshold Problem in Name RegistriesYou look up a surname in a national registry and it isn't there. What have you learned? Depending on which country's registry you queried, one of three completely different things: that the surname ha…Read →
- The Registry That Does Not ExistFor years our notes on Italy said the same thing: there is no name registry. No frequency table of Italian surnames, no frequency table of Italian given names, nothing usable. Italy went into the "mod…Read →
- The Registry Was Right. The Column Was Not.Our Finnish female given-name list opened like this: Maria · Helena · Johanna · Anneli · Kaarina · Marjatta · Anna · Liisa · Sofia · Tuula Every one of those is a real Finnish name. Every one is spell…Read →
- The World Has No Single Most Popular First Name — But Three Come CloseAsk "what is the most popular first name in the world?" and you will get three different correct answers, because you have quietly asked three different questions. Do you mean the name carried by the …Read →
- Turkey Had No Surnames Until 1934 — And You Can Still Read It in the Top 10Turkey's most common surname means "does not give up." The second means "rock." The third means "iron." Then: steel, star, hawk, lightning, pure Turk, enlightened, pure iron. That is not a coincidence…Read →
- What Percentage of a Country's Surnames Are New — and When They AppearedSouth Korea's 2000 census counted 286 surnames. The 2015 census counted 5,582 — a twentyfold jump in fifteen years. Read quickly, that looks like an explosion of new names. It is nothing of the sort. …Read →
- What Share of a Country Should Sixty Cities Hold? On Choosing a Threshold You Can DefendThe cheapest data check we run is one line of arithmetic: add up the populations of the cities in a locality file, divide by the population of the country, look at the ratio. It once caught a Taiwanes…Read →
- What We Got Wrong About Name DataWe maintain weighted name corpora for 64 locales — first names, surnames, and the frequency curves that decide how often each one appears. Most public writing about this kind of work describes the fin…Read →
- What the World's Most Popular First Names Actually Mean: Rest, Praise, and WisdomThe names at the top of the world's birth registries are not random sounds. Strip them back to their roots and a pattern appears: the most popular first names on Earth are overwhelmingly wishes — for …Read →
- Where Our China Name Data Comes FromAsk which surname is the most common in China and you will get a confident answer that the data does not support. 王 and 李 differ by 0.06 percentage points — about 800,000 people out of 1.3 billion, we…Read →