Name News

First names

Giving companies a human first name isn’t a new thing in startup circles. Perhaps the best-known startup in this category is Oscar, a four-year-old health insurance company that has raised over $700 million. Lynda.com, an online learning provider that sold to LinkedIn two years ago for $1.5 billion, also follows the first name trend. Perhaps Oscar, Lynda, and, more recently, Viv, served as an inspiration to others.

In the past two years, we’ve seen Albert, Lucy, Ollie, Penny, Pearl, Riley, and Yoshi crop up, among others. Extra points go to Aiden, an AI-powered tool for marketers, for scoring a brand that includes both an AI reference and a popular first name.

It's a Siri-us dilemma.

Samsung named its assistant “Bixby,” which is very difficult to say in some languages — including Korean.

“Aaort! Come and take your daily 2,000 calorie sustenance pill. Then will we go lobotomize the fluger.”

Perhaps the most surprising uptick, though, was the rise of STEM names.

The baby name Alan is of uncertain derivation, but there are several theories about where it might come from. One theory is that it’s based on a Gaelic word meaning “rock.” Another is that it’s based on an Old Welsh word meaning “deer.”

The baby name Richard is based on the Germanic words ric, meaning “ruler,” and hart, meaning “strong, hard.”

Here are more than three dozen impressive people named Richard:

“I get comments constantly and people trying to make jokes or order me around.”

We like to think of technology as neutral, but machines can actually be just as biased as the humans who develop them.

Its popularity peaked in 2015, when the Echo was released, but promptly slid as people realized it's annoying to named after a robot

Does your name suit you, or do you suit your name? A new study reveals that when presented with random names and faces, participants were significantly better at matching the name to the face than would be expected by random chance. This research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, also showed that the scientists were able to train a computer to match names to faces even more accurately than the human volunteers.

While the structures of these words echo that of simple words and nicknames, they're also recognizably not human names, an important differentiator

A local electronics stores in Kiev, Ukraine offered a free iPhone 7 to the first five people who change their name to…iPhone 7. According to the AP, a 20-year-old man who was formerly called Olexander Turin actually did so, paying $2 to legally change his name to iPhone Sim (sim means “seven” in Ukrainian).

The baby name Karl is based on a Germanic element meaning “man” or “freeman” (that is, someone who ranks above a slave, but not as high as a royal or a noble).

A list of impressive people named Frederick.