Other lexica and grammars

Census

The module selkie.data.census provides an interface to a list of names from the U.S. Census. A sample of about 6,000,000 census entries was selected, and the distribution of first and last names was computed. The actual sample of last names included only valid last-name entries, so it was somewhat smaller than the original sample of entries. The first-name sample was divided by gender, so that the male sample and female sample contain about 3,000,000 sample points each.

The basic function is get():

>>> from selkie.data import census
>>> francis = census.get('Francis')
>>> francis
<Name FRANCIS mr=127 fr=393 lr=385>

The argument to get() is case-insensitive. If the argument is not found in the database, the return value is None:

>>> francis.male.freq
0.16
>>> francis.female.freq
0.039
>>> francis.last.freq
0.029
>>> francis.maleness()
0.8040201005025125

The value for francis.male or francis.female or francis.last is a census.Entry object, which has attributes string, freq, cumfreq, and rank.

  • The string is the same as n.string, where n is the Name object:

    >>> francis.string
'FRANCIS'

  • The freq is in percent. It represents the percent of people in the sample whose name was the one given. Note that a last name with frequency of 1% corresponds to an absolute count of about 60,000 (out of 6,000,000), whereas a first name with frequency 1% corresponds to an absolute count of about 30,000 (out of 3,000,000).

  • The cumfreq is in percent:

    >>> francis.male.cumfreq
64.25

  • The rank is an integer; the most-frequent name in the relevant sample has rank 1:

    >>> francis.male.rank
127

  • The method maleness() returns the conditional probability that the name is male, given that it is a first name. That is, if m is the frequency in the male entry, and f is the frequency in the female entry, maleness is m/(m+f). (If the name never occurs as a first name, maleness defaults to 0.5):

    >>> jordan = census.get('jordan')
>>> jordan.maleness()
0.8235294117647058

A name that occurs at all has values for all three entries. For example, “Morrison” occurs only as a last name:

>>> n = census.get('Morrison')
>>> n.male.freq
0.0
>>> n.female.freq
0.0
>>> n.last.freq
0.048

If the name occurs in none of the samples, census.get() returns None.

One can iterate over all names by calling the function names().