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
- Pet commentary
Tater
Tater is a nickname for potato, and naming a pet Tater is a specific kind of affectionate humor — the kind that says "this is a round, comforting presence in my life, and I am not…
- Pet commentary
Tesla
Tesla is a pet name that carries two very different cultural references simultaneously — the electric vehicle company and Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American inventor whose electro…
- Pet commentary
Tess
Tess ranks #857 with 138 female registrations. The name is short for Theresa or Tessa (with Greek-Latin roots possibly meaning "to harvest" or "summer") and on a pet license usual…
- Pet commentary
Tino
Tino is a diminutive suffix turned standalone name — it appears as a short form of Valentino, Agostino, Martino, and half a dozen other Italian and Spanish names ending in -tino.…
- Pet commentary
Tj
TJ in pet registries is almost certainly an initial combination rather than a standalone name — the kind of entry that results when an owner writes their pet's initials in the nam…
- Pet commentary
Trevor
Trevor is a Welsh name — from the place name Trefor, meaning "large homestead" — that reached peak American popularity in the 1990s and has been declining on baby charts since. Fo…
- Pet commentary
Trooper
Trooper ranks at #865 with 137 entries, registered male. The name is a noun-as-name, drawn from the cavalry-soldier sense and the modern police-trooper sense, plus the everyday ph…
- Pet commentary
Uni
Uni is the Japanese word for sea urchin — the delicacy, the spiky oceanic creature, the thing on sushi menus that divides a table. As a pet name it carries a quietly sophisticated…
- Pet commentary
Valentina
Valentina ranks #824 with 142 female registrations. The name is a four-syllable Latin-romance feminine that sits unusually long on a pet license, and on the registry it usually ma…
- Pet commentary
Walker
Walker is a surname-as-first-name that has been quietly popular for dogs for decades. It sits at rank 1167 for male pets — not flashy, not ironic, just a solid occupational surnam…
- Pet commentary
Wednesday
Wednesday Addams has been a cultural touchstone for a specific kind of girl — deadpan, macabre, entirely unbothered by your opinion — since Charles Addams first drew her in 1938.…
- Pet commentary
Wiley
Wiley ranks at #871 with 136 entries, registered male. The name is an English surname-as-given-name with two distinct lineages: the place-name Wylie or Wiley in England, and the a…
- Pet commentary
William
William on a pet is peak mock-formality. It's been one of the most consistently used human names in English for nearly a thousand years — from William the Conqueror to Prince Will…
- Pet commentary
Wyatt
Wyatt has a frontier quality that suits dogs who look like they were born to run across open ground. It's a human name that has migrated comfortably into pet naming, carrying with…
- Pet commentary
Zena
Zena is the name that sounds almost like Xena but lands differently on paper. At rank 1001, it sits one letter away from the warrior princess — and whether that's the intended ref…
- Pet commentary
Zuko
Zuko is the crown prince of the Fire Nation in Avatar: The Last Airbender — brooding, intensely principled, in the process of figuring out whether he's a villain or a hero for mos…
- Pet commentary
Zuzu
Zuzu is the kind of name that arrives fully formed. You don't need to explain it, you don't need to qualify it. Two identical syllables, Z bookends, a sound that just bounces. It'…
- Baby commentary
Adelaide
Adelaide carries 33,938 cumulative American girls on SSA record and currently sits at rank 271, with a 2016 peak that placed her inside the top 250. The chart traces a textbook re…
- Baby commentary
Aisha
Aisha carries 26,021 cumulative American girls on SSA record and currently sits at rank 346, with a 1977 peak. The chart traces an unusual two-stage trajectory: a sharp 1970s clim…
- Baby commentary
Alanna
Alanna hit her American peak in 2024 at rank 289, with 25,906 cumulative girls on SSA record. The chart shows a steady multi-decade climb: gradual movement from the 1970s onward,…
How we work
Editorial policy →
Topic selection, verification, corrections.
How we gather data
Methodology →
Sources, processing pipeline, limitations.