Many families have naming traditions. The pressure to give your child your own name can be freeing or stifling. In this blog post, Joanna Goddard of cupofjo.com talks to her friend Mary Keith about this tradition.

LEME, of the Lexicons of Early Modern English, is a new data-base for researchers interested in historical linguistics. The data-base currently contains more than 750,000 word entries from the years 1480 to 1755. The primary sources used for the digitized compilation include lexicons from the Tudor, Stuart, Caroline, Commonwealth, and Restoration Periods. Users of the LEME can search for entries by date, title, author, subject, and genre.

What does your name tell strangers about your biological age? According to lovers of statistics and onomastics, perhaps more than you might imagine. In this interesting article, Nate Silber and Allison McCann explain how you can tell someone’s age, when all you have is their first name.

The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) has been continually beleaguered by reports of embezzlement, bribery, and general skullduggery. In an effort to shine the spotlight in a completely different direction, the UEFA has started a new campaign to show the ways the multi-billion dollar conglomerate helps to bring people together.

Visitors to the UEFA website can now find a helpful guide to correctly pronouncing the names of the top European team players. For example, to help fans (in particular English-speaking fans) pronounce France’s team players, the following advice is given: “Basic school French should help. Dimitri Payet’s surname sounds like ‘pie-ette’— equivalent to the sound of Liam Gallagher from Oasis saying ‘I ate.’” Although well-meaning, advice like this seems to have caused more jeers than cheers among Europe’s football fans.

Ancestry.com recently published a map of the most popular surnames in the United States, based on their data. Despite the diversity of culture in the US, a few names dominate, for example, Johnson and Smith.

Why do we forget names? Forgetting names is one of our memory’s most common failures – but there are ways to make them stick. Our brains don’t have a simple filing system, with separate folders for each kind of information and a folder labelled “Names”. Rather, our minds are associative. They are built out of patterns of interconnected information. When you meet someone for the first time, you learn their name. For your memory, however, it is probably an arbitrary piece of information unconnected to anything else you know and unconnected to all the other things you later learn about them.

In January 2016, the scholars of the American Name Society selected “Caitlyn Jenner” as the official Name of the Year for 2015. One of the main reasons for this decision was the socio-historical significance that this name had in highlighting the importance of transgenderism across the United States and the around the world. The process of selecting a new name to mark one’s declaration of self is a common and often highly emotional experience for people within the transgender community. In her TIME article, Katy Steinmetz discusses how some prominent transgender people went about this process.