One In 48 Is Called Mary, And The File Told Me Its Own Age

One Filipino in 48 is called Mary.

That is 2,229,082 people. That is 2.1 out of every hundred people in the country.

The second most common name is Maria. Mary has 2.55 times more people than Maria does.

The File Told Me Its Own Age

This is my favourite thing I found, so let me explain it slowly.

The file has 1,000 names. For each one it gives two numbers.

How many people have that name. And how rare it is — like "1 in 48".

Now. If 2,229,082 people are 1 in 48 of everybody, then everybody must be 2,229,082 × 48. That is 106,995,936 people.

So I did that for all 1,000 names. If the file is honest, every single one should give me roughly the same answer.

The lowest answer: 105,713,344.

The highest: 106,995,936.

A gap of 1.21 per cent, across a thousand separate sums. And even that tiny gap has an explanation: "1 in 48" is rounded. It is not exactly 48.

So the two columns agree. Good.

But there is a bonus. The file never says when it was collected. And now I know: it was collected when the Philippines had about 106,009,905 people. That happened around 2019 or 2020.

The file dated itself and did not know it.

R, Not A

The old version of this page said the most common first letters were R and A.

R is right. R is first, with 15.59 out of every 100 people on the list.

A is 4th. M and J both beat it.

Those four letters — R, M, J, A — cover 55.57 out of every 100 people here. And 3 letters of the alphabet start no name at all.

More Women's Names, Fewer Women Per Name

520 of the names are women's. 480 are men's.

But the men's names cover more people. So each men's name has 80,942 people on average. Each women's name has 68,711.

Men's names are 1.18 times more crowded.

This does not mean there are more men. It means women's names are more spread out — more different ones, each shared by fewer people.

The Names It Cannot Decide

For most names the file is sure. 99 or 100 out of 100 people with that name are one gender.

For 37 names it is not sure.

The least sure is Remy: 51 per cent one way, 49 the other. That is a coin flip.

What I Could Not Do

Quite a lot, honestly.

This is one photograph. There is no second photograph from another year, so I cannot say any name is getting more or less popular. If you want to know whether Filipino parents still name babies Mary, this file cannot tell you — a name common among living people is not the same as a name common among newborns.

No regions either. No ages. No last names.

And the 1,000 names only cover 70.35 out of every 100 Filipinos. The other 29.65 per cent — about 31,428,148 people — have a name that is not on this list at all.