Author
Ivy Hung
Data Journalist
Based in Arizona, USA
Ivy is a data journalist based in Arizona, United States. A business school graduate now working her way into tech, she spent her early career in product marketing, project management, and marketing strategy — roles where reading a name the same way you read a brand became second nature.
She joined NamesPop because the name datasets sit at exactly the intersection she cares about: consumer behaviour, cultural identity, and what numbers tell us about decisions families make quietly, one at a time. Her writing leans on SSA and municipal pet registries the way a marketer reads a segmentation report — looking for the audiences hiding inside the aggregate.
Cross-cultural naming is her main beat, with a particular interest in how Hispanic, Asian-American, and bicultural families navigate the tension between heritage and assimilation in the American Southwest.
2,409
Total pieces
140
Articles
1,119
Baby commentary
1,150
Pet commentary
Ivy Hung's contributions
- Articleanalysis
Freida and the Quiet Vintage Wave in Senior-Dog Adoption
Senior-dog adoption is reshaping pet-name data, and almost nobody is tracking it. NYC's re-registration data shows adopted older dogs carry vintage names — Buddy, Ginger, Rusty — that are nearly absent from puppy registrations. Freida the dachshund is the public face of that shift.
·9 min read
- Articleopinion
Stranger Things Ends, and the Question of Whether Eleven Is a Real Name
When Stranger Things launched in 2016, Eleven was a number. By 2024, eleven baby girls had been given the name. The series finale, dropping over the next month, will close the most successful natural experiment in number-naming American culture has ever run.
·9 min read
- Articleanalysis
The Bodega Cat Naming Convention Is About to Become Law
Bodega cats already have the most stable naming culture in any urban pet population — community-given, community-kept, often borrowed from the cashier's family. Legalization will formalize what was already a social institution.
·8 min read
- Articleopinion
Diane Keaton's Reggie and the Rise of the Trust-Friendly Pet Name
When the press claimed Keaton had left her golden retriever five million dollars, the call boards at pet-trust law firms lit up. The names appearing on the new trusts have a clear pattern: they read like the names of legal beneficiaries.
·8 min read
- Articleopinion
Diane Keaton's Real Legacy Was Giving Us Permission to Name Daughters Annie
Annie Hall opened in 1977 with a woman wearing menswear and answering to a nickname instead of her formal name. Forty-eight years later, the SSA top 100 is full of girls named Annie, Charlie, Frankie, and Sammie. Keaton wrote the warrant for that.
·8 min read
- Articleanalysis
Showgirl, Opalite, and the New Mechanism by Which Albums Move Names
Within 72 hours of Showgirl's release, baby-name search engines logged Opalite as a girls' candidate for the first time. Two of the album's track titles are doing two different kinds of cultural work, and parents are picking from both.
·9 min read
- Articleanalysis
Rocki Irish, and the Three Naming Trends Rihanna Just Confirmed
Rocki Irish is what happens when a celebrity reads naming trends correctly rather than inventing them. Rihanna's daughter packages three movements that have been visible in SSA data since 2018 — and the next two years will tell us how much further they go.
·9 min read
- Articleopinion
Charlie, the Cohort Effect, and What Names Do After a Public Death
Names attached to public tragedies almost never collapse. They do something more interesting: they pause in the demographic closest to the grief, while accelerating elsewhere. The historical record on cohort effects is the cleanest predictor of what happens to Charlie next.
·8 min read
- Articleopinion
How Renter Pet Rights Are Quietly Professionalizing Pet Names
When pets enter the lease, they enter the legal record. The name on the housing application is not the same kind of name as the name in the kitchen. The renter-rights wave is quietly rewriting what pet names are permitted to sound like.
·7 min read
- Articleopinion
Taylor and Travis, the Long Lag Before Any Naming Effect Lands
I don't believe in the parlor game of celebrities deciding what we name our babies. But Swift-Kelce will be a generational test of one specific question: does the most-watched American couple go literary or sporty? My bet is on literary, with a smart reference.
·9 min read
- Articleanalysis
What Survives the Shelter Name
Shelters batch-name dogs by alphabet, by season, by litter theme. Most of those names get erased within two weeks of adoption. The data shows which shelter names actually survive — and which the new family quietly rewrites.
·8 min read
- Articleopinion
The Pet-Nup Boom Starts at the Naming Argument
The first joint legal artifact a couple produces over a pet is not the pet-nup. It is the name. The name is where the negotiation lives, where the compromise lives, and where the eventual custody fight is rehearsed.
·8 min read
- Articleopinion
Sydney, American Eagle, and the Cost of Being on the Wrong Billboard
Sydney has been declining since 2010. American Eagle's controversial new campaign is about to clarify the trajectory. Names don't typically die from celebrity association — they accumulate a tax that shows up in the next year's birth-cohort numbers.
·8 min read
- Articleopinion
The Quiet Rule of Pet Grief: We Don't Reuse the Name
Three weeks after his ten-year-old French bulldog passed, Snoop introduced a new puppy named Baby Boy. The name reveals a pattern most multi-pet households quietly follow — and which the NYC license data confirms.
·7 min read
- Articleanalysis
Connie Francis, TikTok, and the Sound of a Decade About to Return
Connie Francis died at 87 just as TikTok rediscovered her 1962 record. The thing TikTok actually rediscovered isn't her. It's a sound register — short i, terminal ee, half-rhyme — that American baby naming has been quietly missing for fifty years.
·8 min read
- Articleopinion
The Andy Problem: When a First Name Becomes a Liability
Last week's viral Astronomer scandal turned Andy into the kind of name parents whisper about. The historical record on Karen, Chad, and others suggests the name won't disappear — it will quietly age out of new usage instead.
·8 min read
- Articleanalysis
The Krypto Effect: How a Movie Dog Rebranded Rescue
Krypto did something rescue marketing has been trying to do for decades: he reframed the shelter dog from object of pity into power fantasy. The naming data shows the moment that flip happened.
·7 min read
- Articleopinion
Labubu Summer and the Ugly-Cute Turn in Pet Names
Labubu fever isn't just a Pop Mart phenomenon. In NYC and Seattle pet registration data, names like Goblin, Gremlin, Mochi, and Dumpling are climbing fast. The aesthetic shift is real, and it has a name: ugly-cute.
·8 min read
- Articleanalysis
Why Stitch Is Suddenly a Cat Name
Disney remakes usually push their character names onto dogs. Stitch broke that rule. The data shows where the name actually landed — and why an alien character earned a permission slip a Lassie or a Pongo never did.
·7 min read
- Articleopinion
World Pride and the Names That Never Show Up in SSA Data
World Pride 2025 in DC reveals a blind spot in how we count baby names. The Social Security Administration cannot, by design, see the most consequential naming decision many Americans now make.
·7 min read
How we work
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Topic selection, verification, corrections.
How we gather data
Methodology →
Sources, processing pipeline, limitations.