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June 30, 2006
Naming Patterns in Fantasy Races
We were interested in the names that people picked for their characters. Were there commonalities across the WoW races or did different races have their own naming conventions? So we parsed through all unique names in the January data in several ways - by first letter, by 3-letter prefix, and 3-letter suffix. Here are the top 10 lists for these different parses by race.
There were interesting findings throughout. The most common first letter of a name was "S". 10% of all names in the sample began with an "S". This was followed by "A" (7.6%) and "D" (6.7%). If anyone has access to the distribution of first letters of English names, please let us know how this matches to those.
Among the prefixes, it was interesting to see the prefix "Sha" appear in the top ten for all the races. It was also interesting to see racial differences. For example, we see references to "Moon", "Night" and "Star" among the Night Elf names, whereas we find references to "Dead/Death", "Mort" and "Malevolence" in the Undead names.
Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (High), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: Month of January
Sampling Resolution: ~12 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique character.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 179,003 characters
Posted at June 30, 2006 02:33 PM
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Comments
Are there statistically significant differences in naming patterns between server types? Anecdotally, some players say they prefer RP servers because the characters tend to have "more sensible" names; I wonder if that's actually true.
Posted by: Sara Jensen at July 3, 2006 10:14 AM
Moo is the leading 3 letter start of Tauren names. I love it when your data confirms observed trends.
Posted by: BSD at July 12, 2006 12:47 PM
just out of curiosity... how frequently was sha in the first 3 letters when the name did not begin with "shadow"?
Posted by: Vhyrgaal at July 14, 2006 01:20 PM
It's interesting that the top two most popular last three letters for humans and night elves are both suggestive of feminine names. Are there more female characters in those races, or is there just more variation in masculine name endings?
Posted by: Cabell at August 21, 2006 01:01 PM
It is a result of the alliance attracting more feminine males. Horde FTW.
Voodoohex,
Dentarg (US)
Posted by: Taylor G at September 29, 2006 09:55 PM