Milestones in order. This is history, not a weekly activity grid.
- Named persons in records
- Domesday identifiers
- English parish registers
- Napoleonic civil status
- SSA name files begin
- ONS-style counting
- Lieberson’s taste model
- Emily and Lakisha
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Quick answers
Why do names matter if they are “just labels”?
Labels are how institutions and strangers find you. A name is a retrieval key for records, introductions and memory — social technology, not magic.
Did a résumé study really show name bias?
Yes. Bertrand and Mullainathan’s 2003 NBER paper (AER 2004) found U.S. callbacks differed for identical résumés labelled Emily/Greg versus Lakisha/Jamal.
Do names determine character?
No. Etymology and character charts are historical or folk systems. They describe culture; they do not predict a life.
Is a unique name always better?
Uniqueness can aid recall and also increase mispronunciation, teasing or form friction. Lieberson treated popularity as taste cycles, not virtue.
Why do governments care what you are called?
Civil registration, inheritance, taxation and travel documents need a stable identifier. That is administration, not aesthetics.
Are baby-name charts destiny maps?
Official files such as SSA, ONS and Statistics Korea count registrations. They are frequency data, not advice about who a child will become.
Personal names are older than writing: communities needed a way to call someone who was not standing in view.
What changed in the last two centuries is scale — passports, school rolls, credit files and search engines made the same string do more institutional work.
Timeline
- Named persons in records
Early Mesopotamian and Egyptian documents already distinguish people by personal names in accounts and tombs.
- Domesday identifiers
England’s Domesday survey mixes given names, bynames and places — a snapshot before fixed hereditary surnames were universal.
- English parish registers
Thomas Cromwell ordered baptisms, marriages and burials recorded — a template for later civil registration.
- Napoleonic civil status
The French civil code tightened how births and names entered the state, influencing much of Europe and its colonies.
- SSA name files begin
U.S. Social Security later published given-name frequencies from 1880, making fashion visible as a time series.
- ONS-style counting
England and Wales civil registration data later underpinned Office for National Statistics baby-name releases.
- Lieberson’s taste model
Stanley Lieberson’s A Matter of Taste argued first-name fashion follows internal cycles more than simple celebrity copying.
- Emily and Lakisha
Bertrand and Mullainathan field-tested racialised name signals on U.S. job callbacks — a landmark for why names “matter” in markets.
Eras
- Oral worlds — Call-names — A name’s job was recognition inside a kin group; extra bynames appeared when one “John” was not enough.
- Parish & empire — Written identity — Churches and colonial offices froze spellings that speech had treated as fluid.
- Industrial state — File names — Passports, payrolls and schools demanded one official string per person.
- Platform era — Searchable selves — The same legal name now sits beside usernames, brand handles and algorithmically ranked results.
Shifts
- Bynames to hereditary surnames 12th–16th c. Europe — Occupational and place bynames hardened into inheritable family names in many (not all) societies.
- From priest to registrar 18th–20th c. — The authority that “counts” a name moved from parish books to civil registries and statistical offices.
- From local gossip to audit study 1990s–2000s — Correspondence experiments made name-based discrimination measurable instead of only anecdotal.
Names matter because they are shared infrastructure: a sound that other people, and now machines, use to find you.