Introduction
We all take our names for granted and yet there is so much information in it. Your name reveals a lot of information about who you are. It tells if you're a man or a women, what language you speak and it can even reveal your nationality.
Validating a phone number, zip code or email address is simple. You don’t need a parsing service for that. But parsing a name and getting information out of it is much harder. That is where we come in: Name Parser offers an API that splits a complete name into useful information such as first name, surname, gender and nationality. It makes your live as a developer or data scientist much easier. Just give us a name, and we'll give you the useful components.
In the backend Name Parser maintains a database with 2.208.942 first names and 6.119.869 surnames. Because of this Name Parser can also offer its powerful name generator. the name generator can generate millions of complete names per country and gender in just a few seconds.
Supporting 139 countries
In order to properly parse and generate names, our service uses a huge database with 2.208.942 first names and 6.119.869 surnames from 139 different countries. A significant part of this name database is available for purchase in CSV, JSON and SQL format at Name Census as well.
There are many names such as Robin, Pascal or Mickey, which are mainly used for girls in one country and for boys in other countries. By specifying the country code in the query, we can determine the gender of a name with greater certainty.
![Myanmar [Burma]](https://parser.name/dist/img/countries/MM.png "Myanmar [Burma]"){kind=small}
Handling diverse name orders and formats
Names can be written in different name orders . This makes it complicated for developers to check if a name is valid or not. The order [first name] [surname] is known as the Western order and is usually used in most Western countries (Europe, North and South America, India and Oceania). Names can have multiple first names and multiple surnames . This is common in Spanish-speaking countries, Brazil and Portugal. The order [surname], [first name] is known as the Eastern order and is primarily used in East Asia. Our name parsing software can parse all common name orders, salutations and titles.
| Types | Format | Example |
|---|---|---|
| First name only | [first name] | Yumeng |
| Surname only | [surname] | Mountbatten-Windsor |
| Regular names | [first name] [surname] | Jennifer Anderson |
| Names with middle name | [first name] [middle name] [surname] | Stephanie Karen Hills |
| Double (Spanish) surnames | [first name] [surname] [surname] | José Rodríguez Zapatero |
| Surname first followed by first name | [surname], [first name] [middle name] | Procházka, Lukáš Michal |
| Names with salutation and initials | [salutation] [first name] [initial] [surname] | Mr Bob S. Samuels |
| Title with surname first | [title] [surname], [first name] | Dr. Jenkins, Philip |
| Nickname between [], (), {} or "" | [first name] "[nickname]" [surname] | Stephanie "DJ" Williams |
| Cyrillic, Greek and Latin characters | [first name] [surname] | Екатерина Иванов |
Changelog
We always keep on improving our service. We divided the changelog in a section for the API and for the database. Our API returns the version of the API and database via the response headers. You can use the versions from the response header to programmatically detect if we release a new version.
API
| Date | Changes |
|---|---|
| 2024-03-15 |
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| 2024-01-03 |
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| 2023-03-20 |
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| 2023-01-04 |
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| 2022-12-16 |
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| 2022-10-25 |
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| 2022-09-18 |
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| 2022-03-20 |
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| 2021-03-14 |
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| 2021-02-12 |
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| 2020-11-13 |
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| 2020-09-30 |
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| 2020-06-01 |
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| 2019-09-24 |
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| 2019-08-17 |
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Database
| Date | Changes |
|---|---|
| 2023-01-14 |
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| 2022-10-23 |
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| 2021-01-30 |
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| 2020-10-07 |
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| 2020-08-31 |
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| 2020-05-05 |
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| 2019-12-26 |
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| 2019-10-22 |
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| 2019-09-02 |
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| 2019-08-17 |
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