Long before Reddit users discovered the firefighter Les McBurneyddbet casino, humans were fascinated by the idea that a person’s name influences his destiny.

The ancient Romans even left us a rhyme for this concept, nomen est omen, or “the name is an omen.” The proverb found real-world expression in 70 B.C., when Gaius Verres, a Roman official whose last name translates to “male swine,” was put on trial for myriad acts of plundering and extortion in Sicily. Unfortunately for Verres, the prosecutor in his trial was none other than the legendary orator Cicero, who argued that Verres’s conduct “confirmed his name” — an early example of what we might now call a sick burn.

In the millenniums since Cicero’s gibe, the relationship between names and destinies has increasingly become the subject of scientific inquiry — something not just to be wondered about or disseminated through epic stories but also to be quantified and tested empirically.

I’ve dug into the evidence for nominative determinism, or the theory that a person’s name influences his choice of occupation, interests or spouse, and I think there are good reasons to be skeptical of it. But the continued interest in the idea — across centuries and, arguably, against the evidence — is in itself revealing, highlighting humans’ deep-seated desire for order in a chaotic universe and the role science plays in satisfying that need.

Modern popular interest in nominative determinism can be traced to 1994, when the magazine New Scientist cited an article pointing out that scientists and writers often seemed pulled by their own names toward certain subjects. The best example cited in that column by far is an article about incontinence in the British Journal of Urology written by the team of A.J. Splatt and D. Weedon. It was a New Scientist reader who coined the phrase nominative determinism to describe the theory “that authors tend to gravitate toward the area of research that fits their surname.” (Since then, the term’s meaning has broadened.)

Eventually, the idea that names predict not just occupations but also other life outcomes received full-blown charts-and-graphs scientific treatment. In the early 2000s, a trio of articles published in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology argued that people’s names influenced their decisions not only about which professions to go into but also about where to move (they were drawn to towns and streets with names similar or identical to their own) and whom to marry (ditto, but for spouses and last names). To be clear, this is different from research into how others’ responses to people’s names affect their life prospects, such as in audit studies of names presumed to be Black versus white.

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