He said, she said ·

A comprehensive analysis of word usage in the 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020 U.S. Presidential Debates.

Dark Matter of the English Language—the unwords

Words are easy, like the wind;
Faithful friends are hard to find.
—William Shakespeare

unnames

These are names generated from the US Census list of names using a char-rnn recurrent neural network.

The names generated by the network appear neither in the list of names nor in a 479,000 list of English words. The names may be words or names in another language, however.

Your friends discouraged you from naming your first daughter "Ginavietta Xilly Anganelel" but you didn't listen. When you named your second daughter "Nabule Yama Janda" everyone wanted to know what your secret to having such successful children was.

Below, for each word length 3—12, I show the first three alphabetically first names for each letter of the alphabet (i.e. you'll see up to 3 names that start with A, then with B, and so on).

You name your first child "Babton Laarco Tabrit". You name your second "Ferandulde Hommanloco Kictortick". Both see infinite success in life and you wonder why you haven't discovered neural networks sooner.

Below are the alphabetically first 3–10 letter male unnames for each letter. In some cases, no names of a given length were generated for a given letter.

Here are first names for girls with suffixes common in girls names. I took the top 30 suffixes from girls' names in the training set.

Here are first names for boys with suffixes common in girls names. I took the top 30 suffixes from boys' names in the training set.