Escort names: Which working names are most and least likely?

Which are the most likely escort working names? And which are the least likely?

To try to answer these questions, I started with a Google search. Escort Design has previously blogged about top escort working names, based on the most common variations of names for websites they host. However, other search results are various blogs and board posts that are mostly anecdotal and opinion.

I thought it might be interesting to bring some new data and analysis to answer these questions. Let’s get into it.

Escorts on Twitter

I used my Twitter followers as my main data source. This post shows how you can extract your Twitter followers (and also those you are following) into a Google spreadsheet. It’s a few steps and a little technical, but if you follow the instructions, you can do it too.

I had 3,268 followers as of February 8, 2015. Now, not all of my followers are escorts. There are others in sex work: porn stars, strippers, cam performers, sugar babies, brothel workers, escort agencies, and ad sites. There are sex workers who have retired, and those who are thinking about starting. There are many sex work clients.

There are journalists, writers, academics, politicians, and others with an interest in understanding more about the dynamics of consensual adult sex for money. Many of them, like me, say we should decriminalize this work in the more religious and repressive countries of the world that make it a crime – such as Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and the United States.

And there are everyday people who are simply interested in the funny and insightful observations that escorts tweet about their work and their clients.

Thinking about biases, I’m going to assume that my followers who are escorts are fairly representative of all escorts on Twitter. A large number of active self-identified independent escorts with Twitter accounts do seem to follow my account.

Given a greater need for independent branding and a support community, I think that escorts on Twitter are more likely to be independent, rather than working for an agency or manager. I want to avoid terms like “high end”, but it seems safe to assume that they charge a somewhat higher than average price per hour than the typical advertiser on Backpage.

Compared with regional advertising and review boards, Twitter is truly global. But given I tweet in English, the majority of my followers are English-speaking, and are predominantly in English-speaking countries. These are the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, plus northern European countries where English is spoken widely, such as the Netherlands.

Escort names on Twitter

Unlike Facebook, Twitter doesn’t enforce any standards for how a name should be structured. It can be literally anything you like. So to get the most likely first name, I took the first word in the name. When this was a prefix or title – e.g. “The”, “Miss”, “Escort”, “Mistress”, “Lady”, “Ms.”, etc., I took the second word. I also then converted everything to a consistent case, so that “Amy”, “amy”, and “AMY” would be the same.

This gave 2,417 unique first names – only 371 of which appear more than once. Twitter users are certainly creative with their names! To separate out escorts from my followers, I had to assign each unique name a gender: female, male, neutral, or unknown. Neutral is for non-gendered accounts, e.g. “Escort Agency New York”. Unknown is for accounts that can’t easily be classified into male or female.

Fortunately genderize.io has a big data set of names on social media, and allows you to look up the probability of any given name being female or male. Based on this, I had 1,164 female, 883 male, 73 non-gendered, and 1,145 unknown followers.

For the rest of this analysis, I’m going to assume that all and only female names are escorts. This is of course not true; a minority of my male followers are male escorts, and many of my female followers are not escorts. But this shouldn’t bias the overall analysis too much.

Most common escort first names

Below is a table of the most common female names. I’ve shown only those names that appear at least six times.

When you look down the list, most of the names are familiar as popular women’s names in English-speaking countries. They’re slightly more feminine and sexy than average, which is what you would expect. But really, what we want is likely rather than common names.

Likely vs. common escort names

What’s the difference? Well, Jessica is the most common female first name among my followers. But it’s also a common first name among all women. So the real question is – is Jessica a more or less likely escort name than you would expect?

Take Brielle, for example. There aren’t all that many Brielles out there, but it turns out that a particularly high percentage of them are escorts. As a result, Brielle ranks high on likeliness among escorts. Brielle isn’t the most common name among escorts — that’s still Jessica. What’s interesting is that Brielle is way more common among escorts than you might expect, given how rare it is.

Fortunately genderize.io also provides the total number of names in its big data set for each name. From comparing this with my followers, I calculated a “likeliness” score. This score is how much more likely the name is than average. So for example, a likeliness of 2 means the name is twice as likely as you would expect. More than 1 means more likely than average, and less than 1 means less likely than average. You get it.

Most likely escort first names

So, here is the list of first names that are most likely to be an escort working name. For this, I’ve only included names that appear at least three times.

Not surprisingly, these names look a lot more unusual and sexy than the list of most common names. It looks we may be on to something.

It’s also interesting to compare this with names that have the highest tendency to be adult film star names. According to Nametrix, these are Kandi, Sindy, Rikki, Diamond, Honey, Roxy, Capri, Barbi, Stormy, and Aspen. Clearly there is some overlap, but the escort names seem to be more feminine and subtle. I suppose that porn stars literally need to be more “in your face”.

Least likely escort first names

Unlike with the list of common names, we can also reverse the list to find the list of common but least likely first names. That looks like this.

So, if you are looking for a working name that doesn’t scream “escort”, this list may be a good place to start.

Now that we have these likeliness scores, how does Escort Design’s top 10 list stack up?

It’s a mixed bag. Some name – Bella, Honey, Angelina, and Candy – are clearly much more likely. But others – Nicole and Jennifer – are much less likely. And Alexandra, Jessica, and Katie are slightly less likely than average.

Most common escort last names

So what about last names? Unlike agency escorts, most independent escorts have both a first and a last working name as part of their brand. Can we find anything interesting there too?

Last names are a little harder to extract from Twitter, since we need to deal with possible middle name(s), initials, and suffixes (e.g. “VIP”). Also, last names tend to be more unique than first names, so they’re hard to identify as being last names vs. something else. So, I simply took the next name after the first name – i.e. either the second name (if no prefix like “The”, “Miss”, “Escort”, etc.) or the third name (if there was a prefix).

Here’s the list of most common last names for my female followers.

Some of these are of course common last names. But several others – Rose, Love, Fox, Marie, Lane, London, Monroe, Sinclair, May, Banks, Grace, and Sweet – don’t seem to be as common in general use.

Most likely escort last names

So can we do something similar on likeliness for last name too? Given how many possible last names there are, we probably need to focus on the most common list of last names. Fortunately, Wikipedia gives us some good statistics for the top 100 last names in the US.

So, here is the list of top 100 last names that are most likely to be an escort working name.

This seems to match my sense of names that are popular among escorts. Again, it looks like this may be working.

Least likely escort last names

Similar for first names, with the likeliness score, we can reverse the list. How does that look?

As it turns out, what’s most interesting is that for 7 of the top 20 ranked last names in the US, I have no female followers with that last name.

When I look at this and also the most likely last names, my guess is that there’s a relatively short list of last names that escorts frequently choose. So, if you’re looking for a more unique escort name, perhaps, branch out to a more unusual last name? It will help your branding and searchability too.

An aside: when you look at last names that are colors: I have no female followers with the names Brown, White, or Green. But there are 3 named Black and 2 named Grey. Perhaps foreshadowing 50 Shades of Grey?

Summary and conclusion

According to this analysis, the name “Brielle Rose” is the most likely to be an escort working name.

And the least likely is “Maria Brown”.

A question for the future is: how might these change over time? Most first names go in and out of fashion over decades and generations. So should we expect escort names to go in and out of fashion too? My guess is that’s probably true.

And, more meta – will the names that future escorts pick be different if they read this post first? If escorts are looking for more unique names, should we expect likely names to revert towards the mean?

But that’s for another analysis and another day. Thank you for reading!

Update: I’ve written a follow-up post on the most and least likely escort client names. Read it here.

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