Differences between male and female names

The one compensation when Windows takes over your computer in order to do an update is that you get to turn to the many stacks of books around you to pass the ten or fifteen minutes. Held hostage today, I picked up The Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language by David Crystal. I find his work dense and technical but also fascinating. This is actually one of the better books of his that I have as it makes a weakness into a strength. Lots of thinly sliced topics with great depth.

On page 153 he has a discussion of names. Here are a bunch of things I did not know/had not thought about.

Female first names tend to be longer than males, in terms of the number of syllables they contain.

95% of male names have a first syllable which is strongly stressed, whereas only 75% of female names show this pattern.

24% of male names have a single syllable compared to only 10% of female names.

Only 13% of male names have three syllables but 29% of female names do.

Female names are much more likely to end in a (spoken) vowel.

Popular male names have longevity. There are several male names which show up repeatedly on every list of top twenty names going back decades but no single female name appears on all lists.

There are fewer predictable patterns associated with female names than with male names.