About the data: Scotland sources, method and limits

Every list on this site is computed from public records, not from other websites. This page says which records, how they are used and where they fall short.

Sources

Licenses are recorded as stated by the publisher. Check the publisher pages above before reusing the raw files.

How a name is picked

• First names come from National Records of Scotland (NRS) statistics on the first forenames recorded when births are registered in Scotland. The file holds 6,117 distinct name and sex combinations over 2,770,228 recorded births, 1974 to 2024. A first name is drawn with probability proportional to its number of births in the period of the page.
• A last name is drawn independently from the NRS surname list for 2024, in proportion to how many register entries carry it. First and last name do not influence each other, so the tool does not know that some combinations are more likely than others.
• The Realism slider raises each weight to a power. At 1 the picks follow real frequencies, at 0 every name is equally likely.
• All random choices come from one seed. The same seed, options and page always produce the same list, which is why the link under the generator reproduces a list exactly.

How much of the data each list covers

• First name lists keep the most common names until they cover 95% of recorded births for each sex (85% at the lowest if the file would be too large). Rarer names are left out to keep each page's download small.
• The surname list keeps the 1,575 most common of the 2,099 surnames that NRS published for 2024.

What the data cannot tell you

• NRS suppresses names with a count of 2 or less in Scotland, so very rare names are missing. Births where the name is not stated are left out, and accents are ignored, so Chloe and Chloé count as one name.
• The first name statistics cover births registered in Scotland, including births to residents of other countries, and exclude Scottish residents' births that took place elsewhere. They are based on births registered up to 11 February 2025.
• Surname counts are register entries, not people. Births, marriages and deaths registered in 2024 are counted together, so one person can appear more than once. The list shows how common a surname is in Scotland's registers, not how many people carry it.
• Only surnames that occurred at least ten times in the year are listed. Different spellings are counted separately, so McDonald and MacDonald are two surnames. NRS counts versions that differ only in capital letters, such as Macdonald and MacDonald, as one.
• Surnames are from 2024 and first names run from 1974. Nothing links a first name to a surname, and regional differences between council areas are not in the pages yet. A middle name, when you ask for one, is another draw from the first name list.

Pages that are not built

A page is built only if its data passes a check: enough names, a recorded source, and text that differs enough from sibling pages. Pages skipped in the latest build: random-names/q/ (fewer than 30 names on this letter), random-names/u/ (fewer than 30 names on this letter), random-names/x/ (fewer than 30 names on this letter).