Is there a service that can tell whether a given name is Male or Female?

Question

I am looking for a service that can tell me if a given name is Male or Female. I have a list of names (possibly geo-tagged) and I want to filter out the Males/Females out of them. Any thoughts?

Answer 1

I'm pretty sure no such service could exist with an acceptable level of accuracy. Here are the problems which I think are insurmountable:

• There are plenty of names which are for both men and women.
• There's a lot of different names in this world, even if you only consider one country.
• There is the "A Boy Named Sue" issue, raised so eloquently by Johnny Cash :-)

Answer 2

I know of no such service, however ..

• you could start with a raw list of person names or
• guess gender according to some rules (e.g. -o => male, -ela, -a => female)

In some countries (e.g. germany) the name a person can be given is limited by law - maybe there are some publications concerning that matter, which could be harvested (but I don't know of any in the moment).

Answer 3

I know of no such service. You can perhaps find the data you are looking for, however. The US government publishes data about the prevalence of names and the gender of the person they're attached to. The Social Security Administration has such a page, and the census may as well, but I haven't taken the time to look. Perhaps other world governments do similar things.

Answer 4

Plus I don't know but what about Asian language, Arabic, and/or one of the thousands of languages out there.

I mean sure I could see a database of names with the percentage that was male versus female, along with additional information such as region, country, and so forth. But ultimately in the end it would be quite a complicated and large database to be able to deal with all of the possible name in the world.

Plus how to deal with names that aren't in the database? etc....