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Nicknames and Diminutive Names Lookup (CSV)
CSV, Database of Common Nicknames and its GitHub Repository: Common Nickname CSV (Database)
Name to Nickname CSV and Nickname to Name CSV
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There is a pretty massive list of given (first) names (~50,000), and it's carefully curated (not machine generated).
More details are available on another answer:
The best source of international human given (first) names comes from a German computer magazine. The text file has nearly 50k names that are classified by likely gender, and how popular in ...
17
For the United States, the Census Bureau has lists of surnames from 1990 and 2000 censuses here. The US Census list for 2010 was, for a time, available on census.socrata.com but that site is no longer running. (You may be able to find it with this Wayback Machine link.) The Social Security Administration provides downloadable lists of first names by gender, ...
15
The best source of international human given (first) names comes from a German computer magazine. The text file has nearly 50k names that are classified by likely gender, and how popular in each country. It's carefully curated and has a friendly license (GNU Free Documentation License).
The file can be downloaded here : ftp://ftp.heise.de/pub/ct/listings/...
11
Wikipedia has a category with lists of popular names linking to a handful of Wikipedia articles containing tables that should be helpful to you.
10
Finally, Wikipedia and its sometimes tragical affection to compiling lists on everything and anything becomes handy:
List of most common surnames in Asia#Japan (Wikipedia). Every continent and major country seems to contain a pretty extensive list, sometimes even with estimates on number of occurrences.
Category:given names by culture looks pretty ...
9
I'm going to expand on the comment of @Joe above because there isn't room to add too much in the comments.
IMDB offers textfile datasets with enormous amounts of data (details). Choosing one site at random, you see a list of the files (link). Choose biographies.list.gz and uncompress. The biographies.list file has sections incuding:
NM: 'K', Murray the
...
8
You can find a lot of valuable sources in wolframalpha about popular names. Bellow the table, there is an option "sources".
Here is the link
8
There's a sample generation project on GEDIS Studio (online generation tool) named "Personal Data" allowing to generate those data. You can register a free account from www.data-generator.com.
Provided fields for each record : Country Code, UID, Family headcount, gender, first name, last name, birth date, age, majority (yes/no), marital status, address, ...
7
You'll have to go agency by agency. Dog licensing is a local government function. Some cities with open data have released license data, here's an example for NYC.
If they don't have it online already, most animal control departments should be able to provide their data with either a phone call or (if necessary) a FOIA request, although it may not ...
7
As an alternative to using DBpedia as suggested by Nicolas Raoul, Freebase currently has more than 670k fictional character instances in their data base.
6
Wikipedia has a list of lists of people, from that you can focus on the specific lists that are of interest to you.
They also have a very functional API for collecting data, see here for details. For your lists of interest you can collect whatever data you like for individual "famous people."
5
For data beyond the SSA dataset (that goes back to 1880, but has full coverage only back to 1932), you may look at this site
http://www.galbithink.org/names/agnames.htm
providing names for US census data and from British sources. Note that some data are normalised (fortunately the normalisation patterns are Open Source, so you can inspect them and make up ...
5
For the USA, the Social Security Administration has statistics going back to 1880.
The whole national data is downloadable in a ZIP file available for download at http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/limits.html
Direct link: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/names.zip
Excerpt:
yob1880.txt:
Mary,F,7065
Anna,F,2604
Emma,F,2003
Elizabeth,F,1939
Minnie,F,1746
...
5
Here You have names with the popularity in capital city of Poland: Popularne imiona w Warszawie
5
If you are a R user, you can download the SSA 'babynames' dataset directly in R via the package 'babynames' (from the great Hadley Wickham) which is on CRAN: here
5
An exhaustive list of non-Japanese names would be an unwieldy thing! @ojdo's answer seems like a great start for the positive matches. For the United States, the best source for last names is probably the US Census Bureau, who, from their genealogy section, have a few kinds of name data:
2010 and 2000: Excel file of 1000 most common surnames and ZIP with ...
5
I can't find the full data set, but here is a bit on the most common names in Denmark.
Pigenavne = Female first names.
Drengenavne = Male first names.
Efternavne = Surnames.
First first name and last surname is included. All middle names are omitted.
Surnames consisting of two hyphenated names are treated as one name.
5
There was an API, babynamemap, but as you can see it now redirects to the projects source on github and hasn't been maintained for two years GitHub page where the project's source used to be. Aside from that I suppose you could always scrape Wikipedia's pages. As far as the phone book idea goes it looks like there is an API for the White Pages, not sure if ...
5
Yo could scrape baby names from the Social Security site http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/
5
For the USA there is another great source on names: The Social Security Death Index (SSDI). Especially it fills the sparseness in the SSA data predating 1932.
As the name tells, it contains only data of deceased people, not of the ones still alive.
EDIT: The Social Security Master Death File (SSDMF) is available from http://ssdmf.info/ It contains Names, ...
5
You can try the Geonames database.
The GeoNames geographical database covers all countries and contains over eleven million placenames that are available for download free of charge.
You may have to subselect it as it contains many geographic names that are not cities or towns. With advanced search, you can select the feature city, village, … that may ...
4
Looks like there was a research project called Pantheon that compiled such a dataset, which is available here: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/28201
Sort/filter by PageViewsEnglish if you want names particularly recognizable to English speakers. Among other things, it seems like a good source if you want to populate ...
4
Freebase - Freebase is a large source of useful, structured data around lot of different categories. When you search for person in google, the result on left side is shown by Google's knowledge graph which is powered by Freebase.
For people search you can checkout, - http://www.freebase.com/people
4
You can get such information from Wikidata (as mentioned by @sn3fru) with the Wikidata Query Service at https://query.wikidata.org and a formulation of a SPARQL query.
Here is a SPARQL query for number of citizens recorded with given name grouped wrt. country:
SELECT ?name ?nameLabel ?country ?countryLabel ?count
WITH {
SELECT ?name ?country (count(?...
3
For the purpose of generating a sample customer database, the Fake Name Generator can generate random personal details.
They have name sets from many different countries and can also generate other fake details (such as e-mail or phone number) based on a selected country (i.e. all phone numbers will have the correct length and country code).
On the order ...
3
The Facebook Graph-API contains some functionality that you can piece together to do what you asked.
Step 1: Use the User-Friends endpoint to get a list of user-ids. You can use your own user-id as a starting point.
Step 2: Use the User endpoint to get the following information of public profiles:
Provides access to a subset of items that are part of a ...
3
The Dutch Central Bureau for Genealogy has an interface where you can type a family name and it will show the geographical distribution of that name throughout the Netherlands. You can also enter a single letter and search for names containing that letter, so with some scraping you should be able to get quite a bit of data. You can find the search interface ...
2
Wikipedia
Wikipedia let you download the data conveniently, without API limits, so you can get the titles of their 4M+ English articles. Depending on your needs, you can try other languages as well. See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps
In particular, file *-all-titles-in-ns0.gz.
Alexa One Top Million Websites
These are domain names, though not ...
2
Here are csv files containing first names and surnames on a cool data-sharing platoform: https://data.world/len/us-first-names-database
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