What Your Name Predicts About Your Destiny

When letters were also numbers

Hebrew and Greek had no separate digits. Their letters did double duty, so every word ever written also carried a total, and readers noticed. Jewish gematria built an interpretive art on those sums, pairing verses that matched numerically; Greek isopsephy played the same game, and a wall at Pompeii preserves a young man's boast that he loves the girl whose number is 545. The famous 666 in Revelation is almost certainly this practice used in earnest, most likely encoding an emperor's name in Hebrew letters. Arabic has its own abjad values, and the technique runs deep through Islamic mysticism as well.

The Pythagoreans supplied the other half of the inheritance. For them number was not notation but the substance of things: odd and even carried gender, one was a source rather than a quantity, and the tetractys of ten dots held the ratios behind musical harmony. Whether any of them added up personal names is doubtful, and the letter grid people use today is certainly not theirs.

Where the modern chart came from, and what a name really does

The familiar table, A through I as one to nine and then J beginning again at one, was assembled around 1900 by an American writer, L. Dow Balliett, who welded Pythagorean prestige onto the vibration language then in circulation. Her student Juno Jordan carried the system into what became the California school and gave it the vocabulary still in use: life path, expression, soul urge. Jordan's Numerology: The Romance in Your Name, published in 1965, became the standard reference. Seeing that join clearly explains an awkward feature of the method, which is that the answer depends entirely on the Latin alphabet. Transliterate the same name into another script and the destiny changes.

Names do shape lives, though, by a different mechanism: other people. Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan's field experiment in 2004 posted identical CVs with different first names to Chicago and Boston employers and found a sizeable gap in callbacks. Names that are easier to pronounce tend to be judged more favourably. The livelier claim, that people drift towards work matching their names, was taken apart by Uri Simonsohn in 2011, who showed the reported surplus of dentists called Dennis largely dissolves once naming fashions and birth cohorts are accounted for. Your name carries real weight. It works through the ears of strangers rather than through arithmetic.

How this one works: the name you type is turned into a number, and that number picks one of the outcomes below. It is a party trick rather than a reading — the fun is in which one you land on, not in it being true.