Asklemmy

At one time seven people worked in my company and three of them were named Tim. Then I interviewed a new employee and his name was Tim. Honestly it actually weighed in my decision to have 4 Tims in a company of 8 employees.

Because given names used to be pretty much unique in each village and you wouldn’t travel much, that’s why only nobility had surnames and regular people didn’t. There’s no need to differentiate which Chris you mean if there’s only one Chris in the village.

I live within 45 minutes of two towns named Troy and two towns named O’Fallon. There are probably more with same names but off the top of my head there are 2 pairs I could think of in 5 seconds of thought.

Names aren’t that unique, we refuse them a lot because we lean towards what is familiar

Because Christians, basically. Religion is a massive factor in what people think is a "normal" name, for their baby, their town, or their dog.

Trends come and go. You can look at graphs for how popular names change over time, it's really something.

It's a bunch of factors. Other posters highlighted some. Others are:

• You're far more likely to name a person after another than a town after another. (Exceptions happen, I know.)
• Identical personal names for people can be disambiguated with patronymics and surnames, but usually there isn't much of that for towns, except maybe "in [insert the name of the country controlling that city]".
• At least in Abrahamic religions, the name also plays a role to highlight that the person is supposed to follow that religion.
• Names follow trends, People tend to die rather quickly, so you don't see often the "old" trends. In the meantime that town might follow some town-naming trend from 300y ago.

I think this is a great question. I’m going to take a stab at it. I’m also going to talk about it in the US, as I’m less familiar with other English speaking countries’ town names and am not at all familiar with the way other cultures name their towns.

First, a lot of US place names come from local indigenous culture. Indigenous languages have a lot of variability. I’m pretty sure every state has them, and the names will vary based on the local languages. Many of the state names have similar origins as well.

Second, many towns were named after people - either for the founders or for a notable person. The US Census Bureau estimates there’s about 150,000 common last names in the US, and only about 5100 common first names. Because towns named after people tend to use their family name (although it might be cool to live in a town named Steve), they’re drawing from a much larger pool than the first names.

Third, and related to that, last names stick around longer. First names go through fashions. Every generation has its own trendy names, which further reduces variability for the population at any given time. There aren’t a lot of girls getting named Elenor or Eunice these days, I’d suspect. We tend to mostly know people around our own age, give or take a decade or so, and therefore the number of first names you tend to encounter in your social circles will be small. Couple that with the fact that people living in culturally homogenous areas are very unlikely to run into a lot of foreign first names. I think your chances of being friends with a Puneet or a Rupak are fairly small if you’re from a small midwestern town, versus James or Scott.

So, basically, I hypothesize that it’s because they’re sourced and sampled differently.