Lists of Names

Written by Haydn Williams

I was recently working on a project which needed me to filter some descriptive text in Excel, removing all forenames and surnames (programatically). Clearly this needs a list of ‘target’ names to find and remove; Google search results were a bit weak, so I thought I’d note down the resources I eventually ended up using:

UK Office for National Statistics – Top 100 Baby Names Historical Data:
Excel spreadsheet – Historic lists of top 100 names for baby boys and girls in England and Wales for 1904 to 1994 at 10-yearly intervals.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/datasets/babynamesenglandandwalestop100babynameshistoricaldata

UK Office for National Statistics – Baby Names Statistics Boys
Ranks and counts for boys’ baby names in England and Wales and also by region and month, for 1996 to 2016.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/datasets/babynamesenglandandwalesbabynamesstatisticsboys

UK Office for National Statistics – Baby Names Statistics Girls
Ranks and counts for girls’ baby names in England and Wales and also by region and month, for 1996 to 2016.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/datasets/babynamesenglandandwalesbabynamesstatisticsgirls

National Records of Scotland
Full lists of babies’ first names for each year back to 1974, and the surnames that occur most often in Scotland’s registers of Births, Marriages and Deaths for various years back to 1975.
https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data/statistics/statistics-by-theme/vital-events/names

As an aside, there are a few US-oriented sites out there too, along with a Stackoverflow thread which got me started on this:
https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/limits.html
https://www.census.gov/topics/population/genealogy/data/2000_surnames.html
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1803628/raw-list-of-person-names