Motivation

• Every year the Japanese conpany Sanrio (known for characters like Hello Kitty) holds a popularity contest for its characters. What patterns are there to the top 80 characters for the past 5 years?

To start I wanted to see how character name length is distributed across the ranked characers from 2020-2025

[Histogram of 2020 Sanrio ranking]

[Histogram of 2021 Sanrio ranking]

[Histogram of 2022 Sanrio ranking]

[Histogram of 2023 Sanrio ranking]

[Histogram of 2024 Sanrio ranking]

[Histogram of 2025 Sanrio ranking]

From 2022 to 2023 the shape of the histograms change the most: the character names get longer! Not by a huge anount but a shift to most names ranging from 5-20 characters in length.

Without any spaces the top 80 characters of 2020's names average to 11.6 The rest are as follows:

2020= 11.6

2021= 11.7

2022= 11.3

2023= 11.3

2024= 11.2

2025= 11.5

The shocking outlier at 33 letters for each year is the character marshmallowmitainafuwahuwanayanko.

Data Process

• First I visited the Sanrio character website and typed the ranking into a spreadsheet, being careful to use consistent formatting for characters even if their names were displayed differently year to year.
• Next I used R studios to count the length of each string from the spreadsheet and created histograms to visualize.

The Histogram and average name lengths (without spaces) show a distinct change between the ranked characters of 2021 and 2022 (a change in roman alphabet name length of 0.4 letters). The histogram visually shows a difference in length between 2022 and 2023 despite average name length remaining constant.