Want to Avoid Giving Your Baby a Stripper Name? There’s an App for That.

PREDICTING THE FUTURE? 

Choosing a baby name is one of the most important decisions a parent makes for a child. Now, the Nametrix app takes the decision-making process one step further, giving parents-to-be some insight into their child's future profession and personality. Nametrix lets users search a name, then lists likely professions, political parties and popularity associated with it.

Parents.com writes:

'When you’re hunting for the perfect baby name, you’re probably checking for awful pop culture references and weird nicknames. But it’d probably help if you could find out, for instance, that your chosen baby name is peaking in popularity, is more popular amongst liberals or conservatives—or even what kind of careers previous Ambers and Alans had, so you can assess whether you've chosen your baby’s name wisely.

Enter the newly updated baby naming app called Nametrix, an app developed by a new dad during his paternity leave. He crunched the numbers from U.S. government data and Wikipedia biographies to build out his app, which can give you not only the current and past popularity of a particular name, but which region of the U.S. it’s most popular in, which party someone given that name is more likely to join, when the name’s popularity peaked, and the top profession for people with that name. (Turns out, I probably should have been a set designer—and my political affiliations and locale seem right in line with the rest of the Lisas referenced in the app.) Maybe you won’t want to pick Mason, after all, when you discover that men with that name are most often found working as X-rated performers.

But the coolest thing about the app is that you can also look at names in the other direction, and find out which names are more common among Democrats or doctors, if you’re hoping to raise yourself one of those. (Who knew that Elliot and Helene were such popular names among psychologists?)

It’d be great to get the baby name meaning into the app as well (though of course, Parents.com offers an app for that), but if nothing else, this adds a whole new level to your baby naming research. (As if you don’t already have a billion other things to research right now, right?) And of course, you can get a little more insight into the thousands of other folks in our country who bear the same name as you.'

So now the question, if you had insight into your child's future profession and personality, could you be persuaded not to name them after your Aunt Gypsy?