Front matterWhat this is
So we checked.
An aptronym is a name that seems unusually suited to its owner. Usain Bolt became a sprinter. Amy Freeze became a meteorologist. Igor Judge became Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales.
The internet is full of lists of these, and a lot of them turn out to be wrong. Invented etymologies. People who never existed. Nicknames awarded for the very trait they describe, then passed off as birth names, which is cheating.
This project started because of an anecdote about LA Dodgers ace Tarik Skubal's name origin. Sporting News says his given name is Arabic for "strike", which would be tidy for a pitcher. It isn’t. Tariq means the one who knocks — a night visitor. So he is in the file as rejected. That is the point.
We looked at 1,329 names: 691 of them are here, from 54 countries, each with a source confirming who they are and what they do. Some 295, including Skubal, failed review. Another 343 were real enough but too thin, or we left them out. The rejected ones are still in the underlying data, along with the reason each one failed, because that turned out to be the most interesting part of the exercise.
The order
The register runs strongest first, so Usain Bolt is entry 001 and the ones that need a sentence of explanation come later. Each entry keeps its number wherever it appears, so a search result still tells you where that person sits in the whole. You can also sort the register alphabetically or shuffle it.
The data
The full dataset, including the rejected entries, the review notes and the research logs, is on GitHub.
Found a mistake, or somebody obvious we have missed? Write to tips@theirnames.fit. GitHub issues work too, if that is how you already live.