What Your Name Reveals About Your True Self

A name is mostly data about your parents

Your name does carry real information. It simply is not information about you. It encodes the decade you were born, the community your family came from, sometimes their religion or their ambitions, and very often the fashion of one particular year. Sociologists track given names the way others track hemlines, because naming waves move through populations with unnerving regularity.

The one thing a name cannot possibly encode is temperament, since it was settled before anybody had met you. Whatever it reveals, it reveals about the room you were named in.

The name-letter effect, and the argument that followed

In 1985 the Belgian psychologist Jozef Nuttin reported something odd: people rate the letters in their own name as more attractive than other letters, across many languages, and cannot say why when asked. The finding has held up well, a tidy demonstration of implicit self-regard.

Then it was stretched. Brett Pelham and colleagues proposed implicit egotism in 2002, arguing that men called Dennis turn up disproportionately among dentists and that people drift toward towns resembling their names. In 2011 Uri Simonsohn went back through the archives and argued the results were confounded by reverse causation in naming records and by cohort and ethnicity effects. The field cooled on the ambitious version. Liking your own initials is well supported. A name steering your career is not.

Numerology's tidy-looking arithmetic

Turning letters into numbers is ancient: Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy both did it, and the Pythagoreans treated number as the substance of reality. The system that reduces a name to a single digit is far younger, largely the invention of early twentieth-century writers.

Its charm is that the sums are real sums: something is calculated, the steps check out, an answer drops out. What no version has ever supplied is a reason why a total of letter values should correspond to a person.

What a name does do

Names shape expectations, and expectations occasionally shape lives. Audit studies keep finding that identical CVs receive different callback rates depending on the name at the top, a finding about prejudice rather than about the applicant. Names that are easier to pronounce also get judged a shade more favourably.

So a name can influence how the world treats you, and therefore, slowly and indirectly, who you become. That mechanism is real, unglamorous and rather more interesting than a hidden meaning buried in the spelling. Read the outcomes below as five characters you might enjoy for an afternoon.

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.