Articles
How name, address and phone data really works across countries — registries, exceptions and the mistakes we made.
58 articles
- Where Our South Korea Name Data Comes FromSouth Korea has a real census of surnames, which puts it in a small club. It also has a writing-system problem that quietly breaks most datasets built from that census, including — for a while — ours.…Read →
- Where Our Taiwan Name Data Comes FromEvery weight in our Taiwanese surname dataset traces back to a named row in a government registry with a bearer count next to it. Nothing in the head is modelled, interpolated, or borrowed from a neig…Read →
- Where Our Vietnam Name Data Comes FromVietnam has no state surname registry. Everything you have ever read about how common Nguyễn is — including the number in your head right now — is somebody's sample. That makes Vietnam the hardest of …Read →
- Which Baby Names Are Rising — and in Which CountriesIf you want one answer: Noah. In 2025 it was the number one boys' name in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and most of Australia, number two in France, England and Wales, and the United States. No oth…Read →
- Which Countries Actually Publish Surname Registries — and Which Ones Can'tIf you need to know how common a surname is, there are exactly two kinds of answers you can get. In a handful of countries, a government agency publishes a named list of surnames with a bearer count n…Read →
- Which Countries Share Names? We Measured All 1,953 Pairs — and Argentina's Closest Match Isn't SpainWe took name corpora for all 63 locales the corpus held at the time of the run, compared every one of the 1,953 possible pairs on two similarity metrics, and ranked them. Most of the top of the list i…Read →
- Why Address Generators Produce Implausible CitiesUntil 18 July 2026, our address generator picked Ukrainian cities uniformly. There are 54 cities in the Ukrainian locale list, so each one — Kyiv, and also Kamianets-Podilskyi — had a 1 in 54 chance o…Read →
- Why a "List of Surnames" Is Not Universal: What Counts as One RowBefore you load a frequency list, you will ask whether the source is authoritative. That is the wrong first question, and we have the defect to prove it. The right first question is what is the unit o…Read →
- Your Name Is a Birth Certificate: How First Names Reveal the Decade You Were BornTell me your first name and, more often than not, I can guess the decade you were born in. Not because names are magic — because they are dated. A Bjørn is almost certainly a Norwegian man born in the…Read →
- `ucfirst(strtolower($name))` Breaks Names, and You Can Measure ItEvery name pipeline eventually meets a source that shouts. National registries store names in upper case — MCKENZIE, O'BRIEN, NGUYEN VAN NAM — because the systems they grew out of had no lower case. S…Read →