What Your Name Says About Your Profession

Are you in the right profession? Do you want to give your future baby a head start in their adult career? Then the following information could help you with your next occupation or choosing that perfect baby name. Verdant Labs, the developers behind the baby-naming app Nametrix, have made a chart that shows six first names that are disproportionately held in each of 37 professions. This name and profession correlation is another interesting phenomenon that Verdant Labs encountered while building the name metrics for their baby names app. All of the data was analyzed through public records to find the most inordinately common names in each profession.

For any given profession, there are certain names that appear more often in that profession than in the general population. Here’s a chart with six of the most common names in those 37 professions.

For example, out of the sample of two-and-a-half million Americans Verdant Labs sampled, 1.9 percent of Arnolds are accountants, while only 0.55 percent of Shanes have the same job. So it’s not as if Arnold is the most common name for an accountant; it’s just that an unusually high number of Arnolds are accountants.

Hannahs are particularly apt to be Poets, Emmas Historians, and Joannas Venture Capitalists. What do August, Hannah, and Jules have in common? It turns out that people with those names are more likely than others to be playwrights. How about Casey, Vincent, and Roy? Plumbers.

In a blog post, developer Mark Edmond explained more about the methodology.

“Take Elvis, for example. There aren’t all that many Elvises out there, but a particularly high percentage of them are musicians. As a result, Elvis ranks high among musician names. Elvis isn’t the most common name among musicians — that’s likely to be John or some other very popular name. What’s interesting is that it’s way more common among musicians than you might expect, given how rare it is. In other words, it’s common in that profession relative to its overall frequency.”

Some of the findings won’t be too surprising, as police officers, race car drivers, golfers, and guitarists are more likely to be men. Social workers, librarians, and graphic designers tend to be women. As reported by the Huffington Post, some other interesting tidbits found are that football coaches are likely to have one-syllable names such as Rich, Mike or Bill. Songwriters’ names harken back to some famous male musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, including Sonny, Mick, and Billy.

“So, do our names influence where we go in life? Or do the social, geographic, economic and other factors that might have influenced how our parents named us also direct our career paths?” Edmond wrote in the post. “Our hunch is that it’s mostly the latter, but bear in mind that the connection is subtle.”

Read what were the top baby names for 2014, as reported by the Inquisitr.

What types of names do you think might correlate to a certain profession? Did your name match the profession on the chart?