Can the Name Age Calculator guess how old you are?

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2024-12-23 16:30:03

Can you guess someone's age when all you know is their first name? That was the crazy idea behind one of FiveThirtyEight's articles last year, and their surprising answer is, "Yes."

The idea behind guessing someone's age based on their name is simple: There exists an openly-accessible database of when everyone in the U.S. was born and what they were named. If we add in the U.S. actuarial tables, which provides us with estimates of how many men and women born each year are still alive today, we can get a rough estimate of the age distribution of people with a given name.

Joseph has been one of the most enduring American names; it’s never gone out of fashion. So knowing that a man is named Joseph doesn’t tell you very much about his age. The median living Joseph is 37 years old, and the interquartile range (that is, the range spanning the 25th through 75th percentiles) runs from 21 to 56. In other words, a quarter of living Josephs are older than 56 and a quarter are younger than 21; the rest are somewhere in between. Not very helpful.

Not very helpful indeed. However, this method shines for most names because names tend to go through short trend cycles. Brittany, for example, was popular name for girls in the 1980s and 1990s, but waned in the 2000s. Since most of those Brittanys are still alive, we can take a guess that someone named Brittany is somewhere between 19 and 25 years old in 2015 -- a pretty good guess considering we know nothing else about Brittany.