There are plenty of sources for searching the popularity/frequency of occurence for first names, and likewise for last names. Are there any ways to track the popularity/occurence rates of first and last name combinations?
I would imagine that the results would be fairly close to the distribution that you would get if you multiplied the frequency of the first name by the frequency of the last name, but I’d love to see what shakes out.
This is interesting to me for two reasons: First, I have reasonably unpopular first and last names, but the combination seems more popular than the arithmetic would imply. In fact, I have found myself (randomly) in the company of two other people with my exact name at the same time. Of course, there’s clearly some “finding what you are looking for” effect here, but many of my friends/family members have seemingly similarly unpopular names that are, based on web searches, actually unpopular. Meanwhile, my fairly unusual moniker yields thousands of hits.
Which brings me to the second point, which is that having an unusual name combination is very valuable (or dangerous, depending on your viewpoint), particularly in a world where Google puts everyone a quick search away. For example, my wife’s very unusual family name makes it easy to find her relatives, while I don’t even bother searching for my friend William “Bill” Penn online. In fact, I have rekindled relationships with many of my unusually named friends solely because it was easier to track them down.
Seems like this type of question would have come up before, but I couldn’t find anything in the archives. Thoughts?