50,000 boat names — mattwood.fyi

I'm Matt Wood, and this is For Your Information. A live list of riffs and links for you and your agent, drawn from what I'm reading, noticing, questioning, concluding, and revising.

50,000 boat names

An analysis of over 50,000 boat names extracted from NOAA's AIS vessel traffic data, exploring the creative, humorous, and pop-culture-inspired names that boat owners choose, alongside insights into who owns boats in the United States.

An important dataset, but the all-time best boat name of all time is clearly: Earn Trussed.

www.beautifulpublicdata.com →

Connections

Supports

America, 1926: What a Forgotten 100-Year-Old Report Says About Who We Are Both use large historical/archival datasets (NOAA AIS vessel data vs. 1926 report) to extract cultural insights about American identity and collective behavior patterns
The Uni-Context: A Philosopher's One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird The quirky, humorous, culturally-specific naming patterns in boat names illustrate the kind of human individuality and meaning-making that the 'Uni-Context' piece argues gets flattened by modern abstraction
Taste Is All That's Left Boat name analysis is fundamentally an exploration of taste and creative expression — the humor, pop-culture references, and wordplay in naming choices directly illustrates the argument that taste remains a distinctly human domain

Related to

How This Was Made Both are meta-analytical pieces examining the process and methodology behind data-driven creative projects, with 'How This Was Made' likely documenting a similar data exploration approach

Book Prize Index Both are structured, searchable databases built around a specific corpus of named items (boat names vs. prize-winning books)—quirky but purposeful aggregation projects that demonstrate value in organizing niche reference data for lookup and exploration.

Type:	link
First published:	Tuesday, 11 August 2026 at 01:04 UTC
Location:	https://www.beautifulpublicdata.com/boat-names/
URL:	https://mattwood.fyi/i/ec4eedb5