All Comments on 'On Female Names in Lit. Stories'

Names are interesting. I have sometimes had to skip stories because a character's name was that of a family member or of a coworker that didn't add to the story in a pleasant way. A few years ago, in another context, I was introduced to the browser add-on "Word Replacer II." Now, if, for instance, my aunt's name appears in a story, Poof! I can change that character's name to something acceptable to my imagination.

I'm not an author, and I have no idea why i read this. Even less idea why it was interesting, but it was. I appreciate the effort you expended to collate this and share it.

I’m mean this in all sincerity. Get some therapy before it’s too late. All is not yet lost

Impressive

Remarkable, thorough research. I am faintly relieved that most but not all of my FMCs fall outside the patterns you've found. Still fond of 'Kira Thrupshot' however.

Nice work.

Very nice research that will be used in my future stories. I have used nameberry.com many times for names. The site proovides names, origins and meanings for almost every race, religion, culture, ethnicity and nationality. It even delves into ancient and tribal societies that vanished long ago.

What a load of rubbish.

What a waste of time.

All I do is Google "Girls name starting %%" then pick something suitable from the plethora of names listed.

Bookmarking this to reference when I get to write my stories. Very informative. Thank you.

That is a ton of effort.. Thank you.. I am a "First Time" fan,, I was hoping to see the name Nico come up.. Word of Mouth by miwoodsman has to be one of the hottest stories ever,, I normally will shy away from any story over 2 or 3 pages.. This one was 5.. Again,, I have no idea how manyt hours it took to compile these numbers.. Rock On

Wow, my "Nicola" didn't even make the list!

Interesting stuff. I suspect it says more about the average age of authors than anything else.

I'd be interested in how the general Lit list of names compared with the ranking of most popular names in general. Do authors favour short names to save typing? (I admit to having a Dan, Bex, Cat and three Ali's, partly for that reason)

What names are overrepresented on Lit compared to elsewhere? What's the sexiest name of all??

@Kumquatqueen

It's probably a complex mix of mostly authors writing mostly young women - no idea about length.

I'd thought about compairing census information to the overall list, but, apart from the fact that it's would national based and Lit is international, you also get the problem of which slice of time to take. One current list of most popular baby names has none of the same names in the top 10 as one from the previous century. It's quite difficult to get an appropriate list of, say, all the current names from ages 18 upto maybe 65.

@anonymous

Nicola stayed around 500th, moving up to the 400s for Trans and Lebian and just cracking 300 for Non-Consent (make me uncomfortable to type that, but those are the number). Not sure why it's not more popular.

Impressive and interesting.

Interesting. You put a lot of work into this. I'll be looking at it again when I'm struggling to find a perfect name.

A wonderful census! And excellent exceptions (no Sydney, no Mercedes) although eliminating Adelaide for me is like a stab in my heart. And Florence. Pugh, indeed.

Surely these choices reflect the ages of the writers. Perhaps when much fiction is written by people born in 2003, we will have dozens of "Ariana" and "Germanotta" and "Saoirse" (let's hope it will never be fashionable to christen daughters "Renesme"!).

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Speaking of exotic names, I am convinced that Literotica promotes fiction that involves as many populations as possible, from every continent . Saoirse sounds Irish to me, Skye Scottish, Solveig Norwegian. It would be nice to have a list of female names that we could use. For example for my ignorance Jasmine and Yin are the only Asian names I know ( poor me!), and Pryia only because of Big Ben Theory.

However, it is understandable that writers use names that are clearly understood by all readers: if in a scene, Samantha performs a blowjob, everyone understands who Samantha is, whereas if I write "Gugu" or "Yang," most readers would wonder if she is a female or a male.

Incidentally, IMHO, names in the German and Scandinavian tradition can be understood by readers as feminine, partly because of their impact in American film history: Greta, Ingrid, Karen, Helga, and of course Brunhilde (Hilde). Some Slavic names are intuitive: Olga, Natasha (Marvel's Black Widow!), Tatiana, Natalia, Svetlana, and Sonia/Sonja (Red Sonja after Conan the Barbarian). A friend of mine says that many nude models have Slavic names, but I don't know about them...

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My answer to your BDSM question: Yes. whenever I read the word "chains" I always think of Alice in Chains. it's a Pavlovian reflex.

Finally some "news you can use"! 5 stars. Thank you for the effort spent compiling and categorizing!

Mary is not a very sexy name. It has no business being in a literotica story. #SorryNotSorry

I didn't score your work. I hate to admit this - I lost you about the middle of the first page. My eyes crossed over, and my mind numbed like an ice cream brain freeze. It wasn't your info deluge. It was my poor math comprehension skills.

For what it's worth, I keep an old telephone book and just thumb through it until I find something interesting in a name and go with that. I don't think the readers of my forty stories even care if I used another name previously - except for one guy! I referenced the character in another story and got his first name wrong in the new story. He pointed it out in chapter and verse. Really a picky critic and the only one who noted it.

Wow! Nice work. The movement of names in different categories was too confusing to follow; "Anna (+6 to 10th)" - huh? Does this mean 10th in the current category and 16th in the general category? Too much calculation needed to figure out where everyone stands. Believe it would be better to just list category rank and general rank. OR, if really interested in the movement list Category rank, movement and general rank i.e. Anna(10th,+6, 16th)

The exceptions, while totally understandable, are unfortunate. I believe literotica or someone would have to come up with some serious funding to bypass the limitations.

Still, good work and your methodology (using literotica search) could be used within a specific category if an author is really agonizing about a name for a character. As it appears that many authors cannot even keep the names of their characters consistent within the stories, I'm not sure many authors give that much thought to the names.

Thanks for writing this up.

Very well done. I think that the site should have a Tag cloud with specific names of characters, and I think that it wouldn't take much resources or bandwidth to do it.

Personally, I have aversions to stories that don't have aptly named characters, as I think most people do. With some stories you can get over it, but some are so wrong that it takes the pleasure out of reading.

For the few stories that I have written, I tried to avoid names and rather used their relationships as much as I could: husband, wife, sister, mother etc. But when a story is longer, I searched hard to find “the right” name for the character; according to their age and role…

Well done for sure.

Thank you for your devoted research and Autism (Affectionate).

Truly Bless!