Notes — NameGender

14 October 2026 4 min read comparison gender-api buying

Gender-API.com alternatives: price, limits and what we have not measured

Gender-API.com costs €249 a month for one million names, with no public plan above that. What alternatives charge and how to test a switch.

14 October 2026 3 min read comparison namsor buying

Namsor alternatives: when the most accurate gender API is not the right one

Namsor was the most accurate gender API we measured and the priciest at volume: $999 a month for 1M names. When an alternative fits better.

13 October 2026 5 min read data names age

Alexa, Siri, Tesla: what happens to a baby name when it becomes something else

Alexa was given to 6,052 American girls in 2015 and 348 in 2024. US birth records 2000–2024 for names that became products, news events or screen characters.

13 October 2026 7 min read data research names

Boys' names that became girls' names: 145 years of US birth records

56 common US first names switched sex between 1880 and 2024: 48 went from boys to girls, only 8 the other way. Leslie, Ashley, Morgan, Kyrie and more.

13 October 2026 6 min read data research names age

Do names come back after 100 years? We measured it in the US and France

Names that return do so about a century after their first peak: a median of 97 years in the US and 86 in France. Next in line: June, Ruth, Suzanne, Marcel.

13 October 2026 6 min read data research names

French names that changed sex: why it almost never happens, and why Camille is

In 125 years of French births only 5 common names switched sex, against 56 in the US. Camille is the biggest, and it is now switching back to boys.

13 October 2026 3 min read data name-check forms

\"Please enter a valid name\": form rules that reject millions of real people

We ran common name-validation rules over 600 million official name records. Only A–Z rejects 14% of French people; no spaces rejects 26% of Spaniards.

13 October 2026 6 min read data salutation research

How often \"Dear Mr\" reaches a woman: salutation errors from first names in 10 countries

Greeting people by the usual sex of their first name gets 1 in 47 Americans wrong but only 1 in 1,408 Poles. What a 90% threshold fixes, country by country.

9 October 2026 6 min read data age research

How old is your name? Median ages of first names in the US, France and Norway

The median living Betty is 78, Brittany 36 and Liam 10. Ages of first names from birth records, with fad names, comeback names and US vs France.

7 October 2026 4 min read python guide accuracy

How to get gender from a name in Python: gender-guesser, name data and APIs compared

Three working ways to get gender from a first name in Python: gender-guesser, baby-name counts with pandas, and an API, measured on the same 4,610 names.

7 October 2026 11 min read research accuracy guide

Gender inference from names in research: guidelines for accuracy and reporting

Inferring gender from names in a study: validate on your data, fix a threshold, report unknowns, check bias by script and country, and what to write in methods.

7 October 2026 7 min read data unisex research

Unisex names by country: how rare truly balanced names are

Counts from ten countries: how many first names are used about equally by both sexes, which ones, and why a name unisex in one country rarely is in the next.

17 September 2026 4 min read privacy api guide

API keys that don't store the names you send

Turn on one setting per API key and the names you send are never written to our request history. What is still recorded, and why a hashed name is not anonymous.

17 September 2026 5 min read api parsing accuracy

Companies and shared mailboxes no longer get a gender: meet name_type

A lead list mixes people, companies and inboxes like info@. NameGender now labels each input personal, organization or role, and only people get a gender.

17 September 2026 6 min read comparison buying guide

Free name gender checkers compared: what each free tier actually allows

Free name gender checkers and APIs side by side: lookups without an account, free-account quotas, daily versus monthly limits, and what to test first.

17 September 2026 6 min read guide accuracy

Is this name male or female? How to check, and when the answer is a coin flip

Check whether a first name is male or female in three steps. Real birth-record numbers for Riley, Robin, Kim, Jean and Andrea show when to trust the answer.

17 September 2026 7 min read guide api batch

Using a name gender API in production: batching, retries and the unknown row

A working checklist for integrating a name gender API: deduplicate, batch by country, retry only what can succeed, store the evidence, and set a threshold.

17 September 2026 5 min read api parsing guide

First, middle and last name from any full name, in the same lookup

Every NameGender lookup now splits the input into first_name, middle_name and last_name at no extra cost. The rules, real examples, and where splitting fails.

17 September 2026 6 min read guide api

What is a name gender API? How a name becomes male, female or unknown

A name gender API estimates the gender tied to a first name from counted records. What it returns, how each answer is reached, and what it cannot tell you.

11 September 2026 6 min read accuracy guide

How accurate is gender prediction from a name? Measured by script and by probability

Measured on 4,610 labelled names from 25 countries: 94% answered, 97% of answers correct, 91% end to end. Results by script, and where the errors come from.

11 September 2026 8 min read data countries

Male in one country, female in another: 65 names from birth records

Of 18,076 names given to at least 500 US babies since 1880, 65 are mostly male in one country and mostly female in another. The full list, with counts.

8 September 2026 5 min read comparison buying api

Best gender APIs in 2026: a testable shortlist

A practical shortlist of name-to-gender APIs, the response fields and workflows that differ, and a benchmark you can run on your own names.

8 September 2026 9 min read comparison methodology api

Gender API comparison: Namsor, Genderize, Gender-API.com and NameGender measured

Measured accuracy on the same 991 names, prices at four monthly volumes, and which gender API to pick for which job, including where ours is the wrong choice.

8 September 2026 8 min read comparison genderize buying

Genderize alternatives: what to compare before switching

Compare Genderize alternatives by coverage, evidence fields, country handling, spreadsheet workflow and billing instead of relying on a generic feature list.

4 September 2026 6 min read coverage countries

Chinese name gender: what a character can and cannot tell you

Coverage on Han names is complete but accuracy is 90.5% — the inverse of the usual pattern. Why pinyin is weaker evidence, and the name-order trap.

4 September 2026 6 min read guide parsing

Gender from an email address or a username: the extraction is the hard part

Turning an address into a gender is two jobs, and almost every failure is in the first. The exact transform, the confidently wrong cases, and a pre-filter.

4 September 2026 6 min read accuracy countries

Andrea, Jean, Kim: the names where the answer depends on the country

Some ordinary names flip gender across borders, and the error is systematic rather than random. What the country parameter does, and where the data comes from.

4 September 2026 6 min read measurement api

probability, confidence and sample_size: reading a gender response properly

Reading the gender field alone discards everything that says whether to believe it. What each response field means and the thresholds behind confidence.

31 August 2026 6 min read guide batch

Add a gender column to a CSV or Excel file

A walkthrough for analysts: upload a name list, pick the right columns, read the confidence fields, and decide what to do with the rows that come back empty.

30 August 2026 5 min read measurement buying

How to compare name-to-gender APIs without trusting anyone's marketing

What to measure before you pick a vendor, why a single accuracy percentage tells you nothing, and how to run the same test on all of them — including us.

29 August 2026 5 min read measurement coverage

Our coverage, script by script — including where we fail

A reproducible benchmark across 4,610 names, 25 countries and nine writing systems. Thai still answers only half the names, and we publish those numbers too.