This project is a database of common English diminutives (nicknames and shortened forms) of formal given names. It is useful whenever you need to search among lists of people's names for matches in a way that is tolerant to common colloquial variation. For example, "Daniel" may appear in databases as "Danny" or "Dan", and "Catherine" as "Cathie" or "Kate".
The databases of diminutives, male_diminutives.csv and female_diminutives.csv, are manually-edited versions of data that was automatically extracted from Wiktionary by the PHP script bin/generate_diminutives_csv.php. The reason for the manual editing is that although the PHP script does a good job of extracting information from Wiktionary, it is not able to process all pages on diminutives and is confused by various capitalized words that it interprets as proper nouns (e.g. "Sometimes" and "Popular"). Also, the script is designed to stop processing an article and simply print the article's title to the console if it detects irregularities.
The output of generate_diminutives_csv.php is stored in the gen folder for reference. Each time that the script is executed, any changes to the "gen" files need to be applied to male_diminutives.csv and female_diminutives.csv.
Each line of male_diminutives.csv and female_diminutives.csv consists of a formal given name followed by common diminutives of that name. For example, the following line from male_diminutives.csv indicates that "Nat" and "Nate" are common diminutives of the given name "Nathaniel":
Nathaniel,Nat,Nate
The CSV files are encoded in UTF-8.
You should be aware of the following special case which cannot be added to the databases:
- When a man's initials are J.E.B., he may go by Jeb.
Scripts are licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 or any later version.
The data in male_diminutives.csv and female_diminutives.csv are Public Domain.