NameGen

A script to compile and filter down baby names based on a series of rules. This script was originally written to find a name for the future daughter of the original author. The filters and name sources are tuned to suit the author's preferences. Some of these preferences include finding names that have no obviously religious or derogatory meaning.

The master list of names contains more than 45,000 names, with a meaning for each name!

Name List Creation

For the name lists:

1. Scrape
2. Preprocess
3. Merge
4. Filter

Name Lists

The name_lists folder contains these sources

• ssa-baby-names.csv: American names that originally came from the Social Security Administration site, via the US Baby Names GitHub project
• tamilcube_scraped_names.csv: Indian names scraped from tamilcube.com.
• meaning_of_names_scraped_names.csv Multilingual name meanings scraped from meaning-of-names.com.
• pantheon.tsv comes from the Harvard dataset: A Manually Verified Dataset of Globally Famous Biographies
• star_trek.csv contains star trek character names, adapted from Wikipedia
• stripper_names.txt: a list of stripper names
• people_we_know.txt: a list of people you know. Customize this list to suit, include alternate spellings.
• names_merged.json: the merged and deduplicated result of all the above name lists in JSON format

Filtering

Filter customization can be done in one of two ways:

• enabling or disabling rules that are applied during the filter step by commenting out or uncommenting lines in the apply_filters function of names_filter.py
• tweaking the contents of name_constants.py

Development

This project is developed for Python 3.x and works well in the PyCharm IDE. It's recommended to use Anaconda or some other virtual environment for developing.

To install the project dependencies, use pip:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Tests in the ./tests folder are written for the pytest framework.

Important: before committing changes to the names_merged.json, delete the contents of the people_we_know.txt list and re-run the merge script.

Pull Requests

Please feel free to submit a pull request, particularly if the requested changes deal with expanding or editing the non-scraped name lists (such as the Star Trek and stripper names).