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How Many People Have Your Name?
By JLP | December 8, 2006
I was over on Picking up Nickels and found a link to HowManyofMe.com, a website that is supposed to tell you how many people in the US have the same name as you. I found out the following:
The part I found interesting is:
Okay, WHO in their right mind would name a girl “Jeffrey?”
Anyway, I don’t think this is very accurate. I put in my kids’ names and they both came up saying there were 0 people with their first names.
Topics: Blogging | 12 Comments »
December 8th, 2006 at 8:00 pm
I think their database is incomplete, especially with regard to non-English names. I entered some names of friends of mine who have Chinese or Vietnamese given names and the Vietnamese names were there, but the Chinese names weren’t.
There were only 2 people in their db with my first and last name…
December 9th, 2006 at 2:37 am
Usually when odd stats like that come up and the percentages are very low, that’s an indicator of some bad or missing data. Very few surveys are filled out 100%. My best guess is that there are some people named Jeffrey with sex “unknown” in the dataset.
December 9th, 2006 at 7:46 am
Wow, this was fun. Only problem – stats are inaccurate. How can I say this? Well, I typed in my first & last names and I was told I am the only 1, or only 1 person by this name in the U.S. I have posted before about the problems I have run into since my marriage. There is another chicky with my first & last name in our area, with BAD credit. I have received multiple collection calls for her. OUCH!
December 9th, 2006 at 8:10 am
Wow! I always knew that my first name was fairly popular. My last name is not, with about 8000 people in the country. 99.9% of people named Dustin are male… and I find that even more strange than Jeffery.
Now, the weirdest thing is that it indicates there are 4 people with my first name and last name… and I would have never guessed that. I really wonder how they get their data. Since I am one of those people that insists on using my middle initial, in almost every case, it is likely that the records they are finding may also be mine.
December 9th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
It says there are 31 people with my first and last name, which is probably inaccurate, because I doubt that I’m in the count. It also said that no people in the US have my maiden name, which is patently incorrect.
An economics guru has the same first and last name as I do, and I wouldn’t mind being mistaken for her, but she’d hate being mistaken for me
December 10th, 2006 at 11:37 am
Stats are not even close to accurate, no way. Just a fun idea to lure visitors to the site
December 11th, 2006 at 11:05 pm
I had seen this site earlier this fall. It is *not* a db of everyone in the US; it is an estimate based on Bayes’ theorem, which assumes independence, which will skew statistics, especially for names that are passed down in a family and names that are ethnic but also for names that would just sound too weird together (e.g. Matthew Matthews). It is also based on older data and it excludes some less common names. It trades off accuracy to have to work with a smaller database–but it’s a cute idea just for kicks.
1. They got a list from the census bureau of the number of people with each of the first names, excluding some uncommon names, e.g. how many Jeffreys, how many Dustins, how many Johns.
2. They got a similar list of last names, e.g. how many Smiths, how many Powells.
3. When you put in a name, it pulls the number of people with that first name (F) and the number of people with that last name (L). It also has the total number of people in the US (N).
4. Now, you can figure out the proportion of people with each name: F/N and L/N. (Example: Michelle is the first name for 778,419/299,968,595 people, or about .26%–enough that there are other people named Michelle around, but the place isn’t swarming with them.)
5. So knowing how many people have my last name, we can guess that about .26% of them will have my first name as well, so the estimate is that including me there are about L*(F/N) people who have my first name AND my last name.
6. You could try to do something similar using middle names as well: L*(F/N)*(M/N). However, you would probably want to leave out middle names that are the same as or similar to the first name, because in the US one rarely gives similar first and middle names. For example, you want to exclude Ann Anne Smith. (This can also happen with last names, but it’s probably a much smaller inaccuracy there.) Call M1 the number of people who have a middle name the same as or similar to the first name, and you get: L*(F/N)*(M/[N-M1]).
February 21st, 2007 at 10:47 pm
My parents…. in their right mind… named me, their only daughter… Jeffrey….
My mother wanted to name me after an actress from the 40′s 50′s whose name was “Jeff Donnell”. As a matter of fact… she went through 4 pregnancies to get to me… I have 3 older brothers!
I have never met another girl named Jeffrey… although I always keep my eyes open.
I have had a lot of fun with it, AND there has been a lot of confusion in my life as a result. I was almost forced to register for the Selective Service out of High School and when I went to college.. I got lots of “join our fraternity” letters….
As an adult, the name is unique and I’m thankful for it.
If I had the opportunity to change my name… I wouldn’t because I know my mother was only thinking the best for me.
March 26th, 2007 at 11:04 am
[...] Back in December of last year, I wrote a post titled How Many People Have Your Name? In that post I commented about the fact that their stats said that 99.83% of the people with the name “Jeffrey” were male and that I couldn’t believe that a woman would have the name Jeffrey. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, that post received the following comment from a woman: My parents…. in their right mind… named me, their only daughter… Jeffrey…. [...]
January 1st, 2008 at 12:29 pm
I was born in South Africa, to a Yank father and an Aussie mum. They named me Phoenix, which d’under, is not a common name but it’s by no means unique. I know several mates in Australia that are named Phoenix. The name Phoenix shows up in the database as 0 instances in the United States, which I also know to be incorrect, as I live in Los Angeles and have met one other person with the first name Phoenix. It’s rather cool to have a name that almost no one else has
February 14th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
dreieruier
February 14th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
thanks for having my name