1980s Name Generator

How the 1980s Name Generator works

How the 1980s name generator works

The 1980s produced the last generation of Americans with a handful of dominant names before the great scattering of the nineties. Jennifer was the top girl's name every year from 1970 to 1984 and Jessica took over for the rest of the decade, with Amanda, Ashley, Sarah, Stephanie, Melissa, Nicole, Heather, Tiffany, Amber, Megan, Amy, Kimberly, Crystal, Brittany, Danielle, Erin and Lindsay behind them; boys were Michael, Christopher, Matthew, Joshua, David and then the ones that place a man's birth in the eighties, Jason, Brandon, Justin, Ryan, Adam, Travis, Dustin, Cody, Corey, Derek, Shawn, Jeremy, Tyler, Zachary, Kyle, Brett, Chad, Jared. The 1950s one-syllable middle names had given way to two or three syllables, Nicole, Marie, Michelle, Renee, Elizabeth, Christine, so that Jennifer Nicole and Ashley Marie and Kimberly Ann were the sound of the decade; a boy's middle name was Michael, James, Robert, Allen or his father's. The nicknames were the shortened forms rather than the babyish ones of thirty years earlier, Jen, Jess, Mandy, Steph, Nikki, Tiff, Becky, and Josh, Matt, Chris, Mike, Nick, Zach. The surnames changed most. The Vietnamese, Korean and Latin American surnames that had been rare in 1960 were now on every class list, Nguyen, Tran, Kim, Park, Rodriguez, Garcia, Martinez, Hernandez, and the generator gives them about a third of American names; the hyphenated surname for a child of two-surname parents appears occasionally, as it did.

Britain in the same years was a different list again. Girls were Sarah, Claire, Emma, Laura, Rebecca, Gemma, Kelly, Lisa, Nicola, Natalie, Kerry, Louise, Joanne, Michelle, Samantha, Zoe, Hayley, Stacey, Leanne, Kirsty, Jodie, and boys were Christopher, James, David, Daniel, Matthew, Michael, Andrew, Richard, Paul, Mark, and then Wayne, Lee, Craig, Darren, Dean, Gareth, Jamie, Ashley, Ross, Scott, Gavin, which are the eighties markers. The British middle name was Louise or Jane or Marie or Ann for girls and John or James or Lee for boys, Gemma Louise, Kelly Marie, Darren Lee, Craig John. British nicknames drop to one syllable with a vowel change, Gaz, Daz, Kev, Gav, Stu, and Gem, Kel, Em, Nic, Nat, Lou, Jo, Sam, Rach, Stace. The surnames of eighties Britain include the South Asian and Caribbean names that were now a generation settled, Patel, Khan, Singh, Begum, Hussain, Ali, Shah, Choudhury, Campbell, Grant, Francis, Thomas, Osei, Mensah, and the generator mixes them in at roughly the rate of the cities.

The names produced here are those of people now in their late thirties and forties, so they suit a contemporary adult character as well as a retro one. For the generation before, the 1950s page; for present-day children, the American and British pages; and for the Random name page, the whole modern stock.

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