Debating about what to name your baby? Whether you choose what’s vogue, or follow a long-standing tradition of naming your child after a relative, your QWERTY keyboard has a small, but significant impact on your child’s name. According to a study presented at the Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society in Austin, Texas, today’s most popular baby names have a strange commonality: they’re mostly written with the right hand, which is considered more positive than those typed with the left hand.

“We know how a word is spoken can affect its meaning. So can how it’s typed,” said Kyle Jasmin of the University of College London, co-author of a 2012 study, published in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. “As we filter language, hundreds or thousands of words, through our fingers, we seem to be connecting the meanings of the words with the physical way they’re typed on the keyboard,” said Jasmin, Wired reported. Jasmin, along with Daniel Casasanto, a psychologist now at the University of Chicago, believe words typed with more letters from the right side of the keyboard are more positive in meaning than words typed, compared to with morters from the left, known as the “QWERTY Effect.”

Jasmin and Casasanto suggest the QWERTY effect leads people to attach more positive meanings to words with more letters located on the right side of the keyboard, which is everything to the right of T, G and B. We are starting to connect the meaning of words with the physical way they’re typed on the keyboard. This could be attributed to the fact there are fewer keys on the right side of the keyboard, so typing on that side is easier, even for those who are left-handed.

To observe whether the QWERTY effect applies to the names American parents give to their children, Casasanto and his colleagues examined over 700 names given to 100 children or more in the years between 1960 and 2012 using data from the Social Security Administration. This was followed by looking at newly coined baby names, or debut names.

A trend seen throughout the study found that around 1990, when the QWERTY keyboard became popular, the names started to fall into the right hand letters, the DailyMail reported. They chose the year 1990 as the beginning of the “Qwerty era” because this is when the popularity of Windows computers and the Apple Macintosh rose. Names that debuted after 1990 “have significantly higher RSAs [right side letters] than names used during the previous three decades,” wrote the researchers. Name on the Social Security website such as Olivia, Jacob, William, Mia, follow this pattern.

This trend doesn’t mean that every name will be left or right-keyboard oriented, but the trend is still noticeable. These findings suggest over time, names like Timothy and John will be chosen over their left-handed counterparts like David and Carl. Currently, top names like Imogen, and Charlotte for girls, and Asher and Declan for boys, both abide and go against this trend.

Source: Brookshire G, Casasanto D, Gijssels T, Jasmin K. The QWERTY Effect: How typing shapes word meanings and baby names. Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, Texas. 2014.