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
- Articleopinion
Tom Brady's Cloned Dog Junie Just Created A New Question In Pet Naming Ethics
Tom Brady's dog Junie is a clone of his late dog Lua, who passed away in late 2023. The naming choice — Junie, not Lua — is becoming a soft template for cloned-pet owners. Pet cloning has introduced a question pet naming has never had to answer.
·9 min read
- Articleopinion
JuJu Watkins's Comeback Will Move Her Name More Than Her Breakout Did
Comeback narratives produce stronger naming spikes than breakout narratives — they accumulate audience attention over a longer arc. JuJu Watkins's 2026 return from ACL surgery is the comeback every name forecaster should be watching.
·9 min read
- Articleanalysis
The MVD Award Is The Watershed Moment American Pet Naming Has Been Building Toward
Decoy Ohtani took home the first BBWAA Most Valuable Dog this week, sharing a stage with the MVP, Cy Young, and Rookie of the Year. The award turns one Dutch Kooikerhondje's name into a global pet-naming signal.
·9 min read
- Articleopinion
The Fire Horse Year, and Why Some Asian-American Parents Are Picking Softer Names
The Year of the Fire Horse begins February 17th. In Japan's 1966 Fire Horse year, births dropped 25 percent and the daughters who did arrive received softer names than the cohort norm. The 2026 American naming response is structured but quiet.
·9 min read
- Articleanalysis
Championship Sunday Is When the Quiet NFL Names Actually Move
Conference Championship Sunday gets dismissed as the appetizer to the Super Bowl. The SSA data says it is the actual week when role-player names break out and quietly outperform the stars.
·9 min read
- Articleanalysis
The Australian Open Is the Bilingual Name Pipeline Americans Forgot They Had
Coco. Iga. Aryna. Carlos. Two weeks of Australian Open broadcast every January train American parents to pronounce non-English names — and the SSA file picks up the residue.
·9 min read
- Articleanalysis
Golden Raye Mahomes Completes a Sibling Set That Was Always a System
Golden Raye Mahomes joins Sterling Skye and Bronze Lavon. Three children, three precious metals, one carefully designed family system aligned with where naming is headed in 2026.
·9 min read
- Articleanalysis
2026 Is the Year of the Cat. The Naming Pool Is Catching Up.
For twenty years dogs got cultural creativity and cats got formula. The 2025 license data shows cat names are now drawing from a wider pool than dog names. The naming gender gap is closing because the pet gender gap is closing.
·8 min read
- Articleanalysis
The Quiet Boom in Adult Self-Renaming, and Why It Happens in January
Adults change their legal names more than ever before, and most do it in January. The names they pick aren't random — they reveal a generation that is, quietly, redoing the work their parents did at their birth.
·9 min read
- Articleanalysis
Why Noel Is at a Thirty-Year Low and What That Says About Anchoring
In 1995, one in 110 December babies was given a Christmas-themed name. In 2025, the ratio is one in 320. Christmas naming isn't being replaced with other holiday-themed names — it's being replaced with season-neutral names. The shift tells us something about how we now think about identity.
·9 min read
- Articleopinion
Maine Coons Get Literature. Other Cats Get Bella.
Maine Coon owners do not pick from the Bella-Luna chart. They pick from novels and screenplays. The name is part of the breed's performance — a 20-pound cat needs a name that earns its rent.
·8 min read
- 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
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