Nicknames

A hand-curated CSV file containing English given names (first names) and their associated nicknames.

For more info on the source and format of the data, see https://github.com/carltonnorthern/nicknames. In case that is useful to you, there are also SQL and typescript bindings there.

Python API

The Python package is available on PyPI from

uv add nicknames

and then you can get to the csv data directly:

from nicknames import name_triplets

# name_triplets() returns a list of a NamedTuples:
print(name_triplets()[:3])
# [NameTriplet(name1='aaron', relationship='has_nickname', name2='erin'), NameTriplet(name1='aaron', relationship='has_nickname', name2='ron'), NameTriplet(name1='aaron', relationship='has_nickname', name2='ronnie')]

Or, we have an NickNamer class which provides several convenience methods:

from nicknames import NickNamer

nn = NickNamer()

# Get the nicknames for a given name as a set of strings
nicks = nn.nicknames_of("Alexander")
assert isinstance(nicks, set)
assert "al" in nicks
assert "alex" in nicks

# Note that the relationship isn't symmetric: al is a nickname for alexander,
# but alexander is not a nickname for al.
assert "alexander" not in nn.nicknames_of("al")

# Capitalization is ignored and leading and trailing whitespace is ignored
assert nn.nicknames_of("alexander") == nn.nicknames_of(" ALEXANDER ")

# Queries that aren't found return an empty set
assert nn.nicknames_of("not a name") == set()

# The other useful thing is to go the other way, nickname to canonical:
# It acts very similarly to nicknames_of.
can = nn.canonicals_of("al")
assert isinstance(can, set)
assert "alexander" in can
assert "alex" in can

assert "al" not in nn.canonicals_of("alexander")

# You can combine these to see if two names are interchangeable:
union = nn.nicknames_of("al") | nn.canonicals_of("al")
are_interchangeable = "alexander" in union

For more advanced usage, such as loading your own data, read the source code.