In Hebrew and Arabic cultures, a common “category” for boys’ names is wild animals:
Dov: Bear
Tzvi: Deer or gazelle
Osama: Lion (or perhaps any big cat)
Book Freakanomics points out that in the US first names migrate from the upper class to lower wealth people. They speculate that once the upper class see lower class people using their names they find new names for their kids.
Similarly, male names get ‘contaminated’ if they become popular for girls.
In India, many Baptized Sikhs have the same first name for males and females. So, Rupinder Singh is the name of a guy and Rupinder Kaur is the name of a girl. Singh means Lion and Kaur means princess. Often Sikhs use no last name.
From the listof 300 most common male names in USA. Picking ones where the original meaning is similar to the English word. I don’t count ones like Ray, which are only co-incidentally the same as English words. Also not including names derived from place or tribal names such as Scott, Norman or Frank. I found the following:
Ernest, Earl, Warren, Glen/ Glenn, Angel, Christian, Lance, Marshall, Wade, Clifford.
It’s possible I may have missed some.
OK, I’ll grant Ernest, Earl, Angel, Christian, and Marshall. But does the given name “Glen” really mean “valley”? Does “Lance” really mean “cavalry spear”? Does “wade” really mean “walking through shallow water”? And I’m not even sure what the English word “Clifford” would mean, other than the given name.
Funny. A Chinese student told me that you cannot tell a person’s sex from their Chinese name. When he moved here around age 15 (with his family) he took a western name.
Among secular Jews. Religious Jews in Israel and outside are careful to give gender-specific names, just like they always dress their children in gender-specific clothes.
I’m not a Chinese name expert, but my understanding is that there is a lot of variety when it comes to Chinese given names. Each character has a literal meaning, and people generally chose one or two characters for the given name which together have some sort of coherent meaning or sound poetic.
Added to that, the family name has its own literal meaning, and the first character of a given name may be a “generation” name that is shared among siblings. And sibling names in general may coordinate in some way. So putting together a name that sounds nice and has a good meaning is a bit of a creative puzzle.
So it’s not like English where you have this bank of words that are pretty much only used as names, and which are fairly rigidly male, female or unisex. With Chinese names you can go a lot of different directions.
But the individual words in a name are often a giveaway. Flowers and references to beauty? Probably a girl. References to kings and bravery and the like? Probably a boy.
Characters can also be a giveaway, too. Many characters actually comprised of bits of multiple characters smooshed in to one (which may or may not give hints to meaning or phonetics) If these bits are identifiably things with an obvious masculine or feminine meaning (for example, if it has the character for “woman” in it somewhere), it’s a solid hint.
Those aren’t the actual names- at least not Rosario and Pilar. They’re abbreviations of Maria del Rosario and Maria del Pilar.
Looked it up - Rocio is similar. Here’s a list of Spanish ( and Italian and Portugese and… ) names based on titles of the Virgin Mary
I was just talking about this with my wife. I believe there was a Straight Dope thread about this, and I don’t think we were able to find, in English, a name that started out predominantly female and ended up male. It all was male names like Ashley, Hillary, Madison, etc., that started out male and ended up female.
This is sort of cheating, but there are a few (not very common) given names for boys that started out as a female-specific surname, e.g.:
Baxter, originally meaning “female baker”
Webster, “female weaver”
Brewster, “female brewer”
Interestingly, “Lee” has been somewhat unisex but about 2000, according to Baby Name Wizard, it switched back to almost exclusively male.
Likewise for “Bobby” as of the 1960s or so.
Usually once a name is identified as a “girl’s” given name, it stops being used for boys, but apparently there’s an occasional comeback.
Don’t know if this counts, but Hindu names for boys are often epithets of gods derived from the names of associated goddesses or other female beings, which themselves are often given to girls: e.g.,
-
girl’s name “Radha”, boy’s name “Radhakant”, i.e., “beloved of Radha” or the god Krishna
-
girl/goddess name “Lakshmi”, boy’s name “Lakshmidhar”, “possessor of Lakshmi” or the god Vishnu
-
girl/goddess name “Uma”, boy’s name “Umesh”, “lord of Uma” or the god Shiva
Of course, female names can be derived from male ones in this tradition too: m. Shiva -> f. Shivani, m. Parvata -> f. Parvati, etc.
Good point. But, every woman or girl I’ve met (dozens) with a name like this goes by the masculine noun name in 100% of their daily life. The “María de” only comes up when applying for a passport or the like.
Not necessarily. Nowadays they can have those names without the María part.
Actually my greatgranny was a Rosario without the María.
The great poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Wonder if he was teased in school.
And of course the fictional Leopold Paula Bloom.
Apparently “Marley” has been a girl’s name since it first gained popularity in the 1980s. It’s still mostly a girl’s name, but since the 2000’s it seems to have been showing up as a boy’s name as well.
I don’t think Madison was ever a boy’s name. That doesn’t mean no boy has ever had it, but I don’t think it was a common male name like Ashley or Hilary. I think it became a girl’s name when the main character in Mermaid named herself after a street (not knowing any better), which is sort of funny, because there’s a scene in the movie where she tells Tom Hanks that’s her name, and he tells her that isn’t a name.
I had never seen the movie, and I was naive enough to think that the upswing in the name, which happened to coincide with a lot of editorials in the paper against the system of the electoral college, was due to people reading James Madison’s dissenting opinions on the formation of this method of choosing the president. I felt really dumb when someone pointed out that no, it was the movie that popularized the name.