How Many People Have My Name?

Question:

Are you wondering “How many people have my name in the world?”

That is the exact question that we are talking in this article with original research and data analysis that has never been seen before now. Join us in finding the answer to how many people have your name.

ANSWER:

There are 28,281,227 people in the world with your name. That is 0.35% of the worlds population that has the same first name as you.

Not only this, but 94.53% of people on Earth have someone out there in the world with their same name.

Let’s take a look at the research process and the steps that we took to reach this result and answer. Along the way, we will also find out some other interesting information about names and population numbers.

 How Many People Know Someone with Their Own Name?

In this original data collection and research, we amassed a data sample of 340 individuals via an online survey questionnaire. We asked people “Do you know anyone with your name?” and we gave 3 options to each person for answer choices. These answers were as follows:

-        Yes

-        No

-        No, but I know OF someone with my name.

Looking at the results from this data collection we can see a few specific things that may help us draw further conclusions to our questions and form a better hypothesis. The first thing we will have to do is look at the data and go over each answer from the sample set and review the end products for further use.

Variables and Methodology in Our Research Process for Names:

If we take into consideration the variable that is hard to control for, which is locality, we can narrow the results down to America in this case. The results were from all American participants, and thus we can use the data set to exclusively correlate results in a positive manner to the United States of America. If, however, we were to attempt the same extrapolation into the population of the whole world, we would run into the problem of different cultural backgrounds and naming practices for different regions of the world.

In this case, we are attempting to minimize the effect of this confounding variable in order to analyze the data set and then extrapolate that final product into the 8 billion people on earth as an overall average. This still poses many problems, but it will be a much closer result in the end.

4.25% of the world’s population lives in America.

7,660,000,000 people live outside of America.

Multiplier of 23.53

Yes, They Know Someone with Their Name:

Out of the 340 individuals in this survey, 211 people knew someone with their exact name. That ends up being more than 62% of the individuals in this research that personally know someone else with their own name.

Since there are roughly 332 million people living in the USA, we can do some simple math to find that this would mean somewhere near 206,172,000 people in America know someone personally that has the same name as them. If we extrapolate this into the 8 billion people on Earth it would result in 4,851,227,160 people that actually know someone personally with their same name.

No, They Don’t Know Anyone Personally, but They Know OF Someone with Their Same Name:

The individuals that don’t know anyone personally with their name, but they know about someone who does. This answer can provide us with a little bit of nuance and confounding in some cases. It is possible that in this category of answers, the individual simply believes that they know the other persons real name, but it is a pseudonym. It could also be that they “heard through a friend” that someone else had the same name. It could be a character in a book they read. It really could be any number of things.

However, taking the data results for what they are worth to us, we press on and analyze what we have to work with. 15.6% of individuals answered this particular option within our survey, which equates to around 51,792,000 people that only know ABOUT someone with their same name in America. This extrapolation of the data shows us a result that we can then use to find a number for the entire world when used in the next equation.

Using the next step in the process we can estimate the number to be around 1,218,665,760 individuals in the world that know ABOUT someone with their own name. Yes, there are confounding variables in this section of answering as well, such as the fact that social media and technology is far more prevalent and available in America than some other parts of the world. All of this taken into consideration; however, we are happy with this number.

It would be easy to assume that we could use this number in order to find our final result, but there is one more step in this process that is more nuanced than the rest.

No, They Don’t Know Anyone with Their Name:

Here is, by far, the most detailed and tricky category of the entire research process on this topic.

The sample data provides us with a 22.4% response rate from those with the definitive answer “No”. While this portion is surely difficult, or nearly impossible, to judge within enough statistical accuracy to provide a proper significant correlation; it can be used for our purposes with enough validity to satisfy.

This portion, in itself, could be seen as a variable. Nevertheless, extrapolating this percentage into the 332,000,000 people in our nation, we get around 74,368,000 people that do not know anyone with their name. Extrapolation of the product shows 1,749,879,040 people that do not know anyone with their same name in any way.

This, of course, is the most difficult part of the information to handle. There are, surely, many people that have the same name as someone else in the world but simply don’t know them or know about them in their own right. Taking this, nearly impossible, variable into consideration; we choose to 75% of these people out of the category due to the high likelihood that there is someone out there with their exact first name.

This removes 1,312,409,280 people from the “No” category and leaves 437,469,760 in the world that do not have someone else on Earth with their name. This would mean that 94.53% of people have someone out there on Earth with their same name.

How Many People Have My First Name?

There are 29,918,993 known names in the world. This means that there are about 267.4 people per name on average in the world.

Taking the 7,562,530,240 people in the world that we have determined have someone with their same name and plugging it into another equation with these numbers; we get an answer to our question.

All things considered; our research process shows that there are 28,281,226.63 people in the world with your name.

This is an average number, and the results can fluctuate greatly with increased or decreased rarity of your own name. However, this is a middle of the road answer for the average name in the world.

Recap & Summary:

In this article you got to see some original research and data analysis that gave us the answer that we were looking for. You came into this article wondering “How many people have my name?”. You are leaving with an answer of 28,281,227 people in the world that are called the same name that you are called. Is that answer larger or smaller than you thought it would be?

It was also interesting to find out that, as per our not so perfect research, almost 5% of the Earth’s population actually doesn’t have another person in the world with their same name. That is a whole lot of uniquely named individuals. I wonder how many of them are Elon Musk’s kids.

This was an amazingly fun article to write, and hopefully you enjoyed the process as much as I have. If you did enjoy this, there are many other articles on our website just like this one that you can find right here.

Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read this article! : )