What's My Name in Spanish? Or German? Or Italian?

Have you ever wondered, what’s my name in Portuguese? Or Italian? Or perhaps Irish? Well, I’ve done a little legwork to compile some translations for the top 50 names in the U.S.A. for about the last 100 years, for each gender, below. I am not a data scientist and this was rather informally done, but I hope you enjoy perusing it as much as I enjoyed putting it together.

Below are table for each gender, and then some notes about how I put them together, etc.

50 Female Names in English, Irish, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese

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50 Male Names in English, Irish, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese

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Method

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Up front: I am not a scientist nor a linguistic historian. My main source was the varying Wikipedias and my personal judgment in what to ignore or use from such an unreliable source. Lol.

Anyway -

I took the top 50 names in the United States of America as published by the Social Security Administration as my starting point of what names to translate. From there I used the various-language Wikipedias to find the various translations.

For each name, I generally started on the English-language Wikipedia, and searched for the name in question. Pretty much all of the names have their own dedicated page. A good deal of these name pages have some variants or otherwise translated names right there. If the translations were present, I would use these and copy them into the search bar for e.g., French Wikipedia or German Wikipedia and informally verify them by checking their corresponding name pages or finding people with those names from relevant countries.

For a handful of names, I took note of a particular character of nobility or antiquity whose names are commonly translated, and found them on the other Wikipedia sites. E.g.:

• For “Jeffrey,” I used Geoffrey of Anjou and found Gottfried, Godofredo, etc.
• For “Gregory,” I used one of the many Pope Gregories (I don’t quite recall which one) and found Gréagóir, Gregorio, etc. And so on.

For many names, particularly in Irish where the Wikipedia pickings are comparatively slim, I had to do a bit of six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon type jumping from page to page to find my target. This was greatly facilitated by the fact that many names on these two lists are biblical or otherwise common Saint names – I was able to find Joseph through Mary through Christianity, various apostles through Jesus, or Rebecca through her husband Jacob. I also figured out “Naomh” meant something like “Saint” or “Holy” in Irish, and used that to my advantage in the search bar when guessing at names.

Sometimes I wouldn’t be able to find any reference to a translation for a particular language, to which I would then type into Duckduckgo something like “Rebecca in Irish,” find some references, and then take that back into the Wikipedias. If I couldn’t find any reference to it in Wikipedia, though, I would not use it.

Some Self-Imposed Rules

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• If I couldn’t find evidence of it being used pre-WW2 in a particular language, or if it appeared to me to be likely entirely promulgated by TV/Movie cross-cultural exchange, I ignored it. E.g., Ashley, Brian, Kevin, Shirley. I thought it would be more entertaining to ignore such cases.
• If it seemed like the English version coexists with or is otherwise supplanting more original and older versions, I went with the older versions, e.g., Jennifer / Ginebra.
• If there exists no true common-use name in a particular language, but an old / obsolete version existed, I went with that. E.g., Jeffrey in English, Godofredo in Spanish (more of a direct cognate to Godfrey, which is also obsolete but is the English ancestor of Jeffrey).
• If a name appeared to be promulgated as a translation of a name not because it was of a related ancestry or meaning, but because it sounded similar and has thus been chosen by some body as a reasonable stand-in, I ignored it. I.e., Samuel in Irish being “Somhairle” or Gary in Irish being “Garaidh.” I stuck to names that seemed to me to share ancestry and have since diverged, or otherwise shared very similar meanings, rather than chosen renderings of similar-sounding but seemingly unrelated names.

Some Random Notes

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• I was surprised that Enrique / Heinrich were not related to Eric. I always thought they were.
• I was surprised that Brendan and Brandon appear to be quite unrelated.
• I was surprised that “Linda” in English does not come directly from “Linda,” a word for “Pretty” in Spanish. It rather seemingly comes from German, “Lind,” possibly meaning “soft, tender.” Who knows if they are related farther back down the human language tree.
• I was surprised at how many American girl names seem to be of fully English origin and have only recently made their way to other languages in English form rather than having longer histories elsewhere, e.g., Heather, Brenda, Pamela.
• “Donna” was an interesting case, as it means “Woman” in Italian, and used to mean something like “Lady” or “Mrs.” in Italian. It is the only one on the list that I think is simply a word currently in use in another language, that English speakers have adopted as a first name, that no one else has. It mirrors the idea of another name not on this list, one that I have known Spanish speakers to use: “Leidy,” which is “Lady” in English phonetically spelled in Spanish.
• ^ - Maria appears to be the only name out of all 100 from the Social Security Administration list which I would assert is not a normatively American English name. It is rather almost certainly propelled onto the list by Hispanic and Italian Americans, with whom it is, in my anecdotal estimation, an immensely popular name.

Top 50 Names From 1925-2024 in the United States of America

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https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/decades/century.html

(Unreliable, Nor Rigorously Checked) Sources Used for Translations

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https://www.wikipedia.org/ (the 7 various language-specific sub-sites)

https://www.wiktionary.org/ (ditto)

Tools I Used

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• Firefox Browser
• Duckduckgo Search Engine
• Excel 2021
• TableConvert.com https://tableconvert.com/excel-to-markdown