A Career Studying Names: What’s In a Name?

Bruce Lansky, who is known as “The Baby Name Guru,” has been researching names and writing books about names for more than thirty years. But he also has his own personal experience that shaped his interest in how a name can influence the way the world perceives you.

Lansky’s first name is Samuel and he grew up being called Sammy Lanksy. As a child, he was a bit smaller than his classmates—a difference that was magnified after he skipped two grades. His childhood nickname stuck and by the time he was in high school—despite having had a growth spurt and becoming a varsity athlete—everyone still called him Sammy.

“It was a pain in the ass,” he says.

When he entered graduate school at the University of Chicago, he decided he was fed up with having a “little kid name” and he introduced himself as Bruce, which is his middle name.

“It was so interesting to see how people reacted differently to me,” Lansky remembers. “Bruce was a different person and I got a clean start.”

That personal experience shaped his academic interests while he was studying sociology and social psychology in graduate school. He became fascinated by psychological studies about names.

“My curiosity about names—and my name in particular—led me to read these obscure journals and I found that there was a function of research which showed that names affected how people were perceived,” Lanksy said. “I spent a lot more time than most people did thinking about names and how your identity is tied up in your name.”

In 1978, Lansky published his first book on baby names and has since written eight more books to help people understand names and the significance of names. His books have sold more than 9.5 million copies.

Lansky co-authored a book with Barry Sinrod called The Baby Name Survey Book that was the first publication to highlight image research into names. They surveyed more than 100,000 people to get their impressions of names and determine which names people most commonly associate with certain attributes such as intelligence or attractiveness.