The historical first name tool hivoto comprises approximately 202,000 different spelling variants of given names—including misspellings and abbreviations—which are each linked to controlled standardised forms. Currently, these variants have been consolidated into around 17,800 standard variants. Work on standardisation and its granularity is ongoing. Further versions will be published at a later date. Based on this dataset, given names can be standardised uniformly, assigned to a sex category or annotated with indications of ambiguity, and statistical probabilities for each sex can be determined.
The name variants mainly originate from the 17th to the mid-20th century and include handwritten and printed sources from across the German-speaking world. Only German-language given names have been recorded; occasionally appearing names from other languages have also been included. The tool is primarily intended for the standardisation, quality assurance and analysis of serial sources containing personal data.