firstnam.es publishes data about first names: how many people bear each name, in which countries and in what proportion. This page explains where that data comes from, what exactly each figure measures and what its limitations are, so that you can judge for yourself what you read.
Data sources
We work exclusively with publicly available data:
- Public name-frequency compilations: open-access databases that aggregate official records from each country and make it possible to compare the same name across more than 230 countries and territories. They are the main source of the bearer figures.
- National statistics offices that publish first-name statistics: INE (Spain), INSEE (France), ISTAT (Italy), Statistics Canada, the Social Security Administration (United States), ONS (United Kingdom), among others. They are cited as a reference and are not the source of these figures.
- Onomastic sources (name dictionaries and reference literature) for origin, meaning and equivalents across languages.
- International organizations (United Nations, World Bank), for population figures only, used to compute proportions. None of them publishes name frequencies.
What each figure measures
- The figure for a name in a country is the number of living people who bear it, of any age, according to the latest available source. It is not the number of births in a given year.
- The boy and girl lists for each country are ordered by that same total of bearers, not by last year's registrations.
- The sex assigned to each name is the predominant one across all countries; in a specific country it may differ (a masculine name in one culture can be feminine in another).
- Spelling variants of the same name (with or without accents, with different transliterations) are unified under a common form so that countries can be compared.
Collection and processing
- Collection: systematic extraction from public sources, giving priority for each country to the most recent and most authoritative one.
- Normalization: Unicode encoding, transliteration of non-Latin scripts and unification of spellings, so that the same name is counted only once.
- Publication: only pages with data from at least three countries or at least 200 bearers are offered to search engines. The rest remain accessible but unindexed, so as not to publish pages without substance.
The texts
The figures come from the sources; the accompanying texts — origin, diminutives, equivalents, related names — are produced from templates written and reviewed by the team and are corrected continuously. If you find a sentence that does not fit your name or your language, write to us and we will review it.
Update frequency
Data is reviewed continuously, prioritized by demand. When a source publishes a new edition, it is incorporated as soon as possible.
Coverage
More than 230 countries and territories and content in 8 languages: Spanish, English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Polish and Dutch.
Personal data
firstnam.es neither stores nor publishes personal data: all figures are statistical aggregates by name and country. No individual person is ever identified.
Known limitations
- Sources do not share the same date or the same coverage in every country.
- Transliteration of names from non-Latin scripts may split one name across several spellings.
- Sex is assigned per name and not per country, as explained above.
- Figures are approximations based on the best available sources, not an exact census.
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