An introduction to unisex names
You know Frankie and Riley and Harley and Marley... but do you recall the most unisex name of them all?
Hi. I intended my first proper post to be about my local wanderings, but then noticed that the 2021 baby names data for England had been published and decided to update my list of the country’s most unisex names instead.
Unisex names are an enduring fascination of mine. I started thinking about the subject years ago when somebody pointed out that in one way or another, all my children’s names could be regarded as unisex (in fact my son’s health visitor, upon hearing his name, wrote in his Red Book that he was a girl 😳). Because I like to quantify things, I started to wonder how one would measure which names are the *most* unisex. I’ve written about my thought processes on this elsewhere, but in the end I came up with an index which I very humbly called the Canovan Number. This takes into account both the total number of babies with any given name (higher preferred), as well as the girl:boy ratio (nearer to 1 preferred).
When I first devised this index, the most recent set of baby name data was for 2017. In that year the most unisex name was Frankie, given to 436 girls and 1,114 boys, followed by Quinn and Harley.
And now that the 2021 baby names data is out, I’ve run the calculations again. The year’s most unisex baby names were:
Remi, Robin and Avery are new entrants to the top 10, while River, which was at number 4 in 2017, is in the top spot. It has been suggested to me that River Song could be the inspiration; I don’t want to get into trouble with the BBC so please enjoy this depiction created for me by DALL-E:
I’m not sure if this makes sense. The average age of mothers in the UK is around 31, and River Song first appeared in 2008 when 2021’s average mother was 18. Is 1 a bit old to be interested in Doctor Who? I don’t feel qualified to answer.
Sadly (for me) unisex names are generally unpopular. Frankie, the most popular boys’ name in our top 10 with 920 entries, is ranked 65th on the full list of male names and is dwarfed by the number 1, Noah, given to 4,525 boys (and 12 girls). Similarly Eden, given to 585 girls, is at 92 on the list; number 1 was Olivia, given to 3,649 girls and no boys.
Whether the Canovan index is the best way of quantifying the most unisex names is moot. US news and stats site 538 used a formula where at least one-third of a name’s recipients must be female and one-third male. However I think my approach is preferable because it gives more weight to popular names; using the 2021 UK data, 538’s 20th name would be Nikita, with 53 entries, whereas the Canovan Number gives a 20th entry of Aubrey, with 298 in total, 22% male.
There’s not much in the academic literature about unisex names, but two scholars who have published on the subject are Herbert Barry III and Aylene S Harper. Barry & Harper use a different methodology again; in this paper, they simply specify that a unisex name must be given to a minimum number of both boys and girls, based on population (the minimum number is of the order of 0.04% of babies born, although there are complexities caused by fluctuating birth rates). For my cohort, on a very rough calculation this would require each name to have around 240 entries for both girls and boys. This would only leave me with three names - River, Frankie and Riley - so again I prefer my method as producing a larger, and thus to my mind more interesting, list.
Barry and Harper have some interesting theories about the way unisex names change. Look out for my findings on this in a future post. See you next time!