Baby name pattern matching in R

Girls names ending in “ita”

The first pattern I tried matching was girls’ names that ended with the same pattern as my daughter Lita’s name.

ita <- "ita" %R% END

Let’s see what we get:

## 64  girls' names match the 'ita' pattern

Some pretty names!

Boys names rhyming with “Aiden”

I was thinking recently there have been a lot of boys’ names rhyming with Aidan and Jaden. This one is more complex than the “ita” example because there are several ways to spell the sound “aden”. Here is the search expression I wrote, accounting for the different possible spellings.

aden <- or("A", "a") %R% 
  zero_or_more(char_class("iey")) %R% 
  "d" %R% 
  or("a", "e") %R% 
  one_or_more("n") %R% 
  END

Here’s what we get from boys’ names:

## 142  boys' names match the 'aden' pattern

That’s a lot of different spelling options and starting sounds!

Girls names starting with J and ending in N sound

Now let’s say you want to find a girl’s name that starts with the J sound and ends with an N sound. Let’s use this pattern:

j_n <- or("J", "Gi", "Ge") %R% 
  one_or_more(WRD) %R% 
  "n" %R% 
  optional("e") %R% 
  END

And the output:

## 320  girls' names match the 'j_n' pattern

So many to choose from! Btw I have a search pattern to find all the different spellings of Jasmine (including those that start with a “Y”) if anyone is interested!

Boys names ending in “ter”

Suppose you were looking for a boy’s name and you like names ending in “ter” and want to see some options. This is an easy search pattern:

ter <- "ter" %R% 
  END

So here’s what we get:

## 52  boys' names match the 'ter' pattern

I like a lot of those!

Names that rhyme with “Cory”

Names that rhyme with Cory or Rory occur a lot among both boys and girls. This time I’ll build the search pattern and run it on both boys and girls names.

ory <- START %R% 
  one_or_more(negated_char_class("aeiouAEIOU")) %R% 
  or("o", "au") %R% 
  one_or_more("r") %R% 
  one_or_more(char_class("iey")) %R%
  END

Ladies first:

## 53  girls' names match the 'ory' pattern

And now gentlemen:

## 29  boys' names match the 'ory' pattern

I see some overlap and some exclusive to either boys or girls. Are girls names more likely to end in “ee” or “i” or “ie” than boys names? It seems like they might be, but I’m not making any conclusions today.