Names most likely to appear in the middle

"What is the most middle name in the United States? Erin Davis grew curious enough to find the answers in data. For females, the most middle names are Rae, Marie, and Mae. For males, the most middle names are Lee, Kumar, and Ray. The answers are straightforward, but finding the answers was more roundabout, because you can't just dig into the annual baby names dataset from the Social Security Administration. Instead, Davis used voter registration data, which comes with its own challenges."

"For females, the most middle names are Rae, Marie, and Mae. For males, the most middle names are Lee, Kumar, and Ray."

The most common female middle names in the United States are Rae, Marie, and Mae. The most common male middle names are Lee, Kumar, and Ray. These findings required using voter registration records because the Social Security Administration annual baby names dataset does not include middle names. Voter registration data supplies explicit middle-name fields but requires extensive cleaning to handle missing entries, initials, abbreviations, and formatting inconsistencies. Sampling biases across states, age cohorts, and registration practices complicate frequency estimates. After cleaning and normalizing entries, aggregated counts reveal the listed top middle names by sex.

Read at FlowingData