The results of the survey’s are in and we now have the top 100 Boy and Girl variable names of 2021! Thousands of public repos across github were reviewed to determine the most popular variable names. To settle any disputes from last year, differences in spellings, capitalizations and underscores were not used to differentiate names on the list.
It should be no surprise that i, and j are still on the top of the list defining boy and girl variable names across millions of for loops! One big upset is the waning popularity of the once famous variables foo and bar. In an extremely unexpected turn of events, Elon Musk and Grimes’ son X Æ A-12 happened to make the list just barely at number 49.
Like any coder, you just want your variables to be able to fit in with other coders and it’s important to know what sort of variable names are popular at the moment. Unfortunately, these variable names have only become less descriptive than they were last year. While most experts agree that good variable names should be descriptive, these names, yet again, tend to not represent anything in particular other than generic CompSci concepts at best.
| Boy Variable names | Girl Variable Names | |
| 0. | i | j |
| 1. | k | t |
| 2. | x | y |
| 3. | t | z |
| 4. | iter | temp |
| 5. | list | Names |
| 6. | path | f |
| 7. | s | inc |
| 8. | x2 | pts |
| 9. | func | temp_vec |
| 10. | Time | ptr |
| 11. | var | y2 |
| 12. | msg | n |
| 13. | len | input |
| 14. | output | id |
| 15. | ii | vec |
| 16. | str | v |
| 17. | theta | jj |
| 18. | sum | r |
| 19. | num | c |
| 20. | a | var_out |
| 21. | pub | sub |
| 22. | im | b |
| 23. | pos | string |
| 24. | c | vals |
| 25. | loc | sigma |
| 26. | copy | mat |
| 27. | err | yes |
| 28. | ctr | map |
| 29. | fpath | items |
| 30. | tst | none |
| 31. | var_in | p |
| 32. | sec | rcvr |
| 33. | state | angle |
| 34. | filename | check |
| 35. | all | rst |
| 36. | dat | idx |
| 37. | array | next |
| 38. | arg | text |
| 39. | current | prob |
| 40. | parm | right |
| 41. | any | used |
| 42. | x_t | this |
| 43. | left | data |
| 44. | unit | word |
| 45. | failed | scores |
| 46. | foo | info |
| 47. | sender | bar |
| 48. | X_Æ_A-12 | found |
| 49. | rng | ret |
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