Author
Jack Lin
Founder & Editor-in-Chief
Based in Taipei, Taiwan
Jack is a software engineer based in Taipei, Taiwan. He built NamesPop because the naming tools he found online all felt the same: slow, ad-heavy, and better at gathering SEO keywords than answering a parent's actual question.
He spends most of his writing time on trend analysis, data provenance, and the question of how software changes the small family decisions that used to happen in living rooms. Lately he has been thinking about how algorithms shape naming itself — what it means when a top-100 list starts to feel like a recommendation engine.
He lives with a rabbit named Money, which is where most of his pet-naming opinions come from.
2,387
Total pieces
131
Articles
1,085
Baby commentary
1,171
Pet commentary
Jack Lin's contributions
- Baby commentary
Christopher
Over 2 million American babies have been named Christopher since SSA tracking began. It was a top 10 boys' name from 1967 to 1998 — a thirty-one-year reign that puts it in the sam…
- Baby commentary
Claire
Claire is one of those rare names that has held the SSA top 100 with remarkably little drama. The 2016 peak at #38 was just one ripple in a long, stable line. Since 1980, Claire h…
- Baby commentary
Cole
Cole peaked in 2002 at rank 65 and has slid to 162 in 2024, putting more than 20 years between its summit and its current position. Over a hundred and fifty thousand boys have bee…
- Baby commentary
Daphne
Daphne reached its current peak at rank 192 in 2024, the same year as the data snapshot, with about 42,400 cumulative American girls on SSA record. The chart climb has been steady…
- Baby commentary
Dawson
Dawson peaked in 1999 at rank 110 and has slid to 139 in 2024. The chart shape is one of the textbook examples of a single TV show driving a name's climb. Dawson's Creek aired on…
- Baby commentary
Declan
Declan peaked in 2019 at rank 105 and has settled at 131 since. The chart shape is unusual for an Irish-coded name. A quiet 1990s appearance, a steady 2000s climb, a 2010s peak, a…
- Baby commentary
Dominic
Dominic peaked in 2013 and has been quietly holding rank 108 ever since. That is unusual. Most names that peak in the early 2010s are sliding harder by 2025. Dominic's plateau sug…
- Baby commentary
Easton
Easton was rank 723 in 2000 and rank 76 by 2016 — an ascent of more than 600 positions in sixteen years. The trajectory mirrors the broader -ston surname-first cluster (Weston, Pr…
- Baby commentary
Eli
Eli climbed from rank 308 in 1990 to rank 53 in 2012 — a 250-position ascent in twenty-two years. The trajectory is one of the cleanest examples of a short biblical name riding th…
- Baby commentary
Eliana
Eliana hit its highest-ever SSA rank of #18 in 2024 — the year of this writing, with the climb still active. The name was outside the top 1000 in 2000. The trajectory from invisib…
- Baby commentary
Ellie
Ellie reached its highest-ever SSA rank of #21 in 2024, a year that saw the name continuing to climb rather than plateau. What makes Ellie unusual is that it began as a nickname —…
- Baby commentary
Eloise
Eloise hit its peak rank in 2024 — meaning it is still climbing at the moment this article publishes. That's an unusual position for a name with medieval Latin roots and a 20th-ce…
- Baby commentary
Elsie
Nearly 50 years of continuous top-100 strength puts a name firmly in the early-20th-century vintage cohort. Elsie peaked at rank 56 in 1918 and held that band from 1880 through 19…
- Baby commentary
Ember
An Old English word for the glowing fragments left after a fire is now the 137th most popular American girls' name. Ember climbed there from outside the top 1000 in 2005. With aro…
- Baby commentary
Emilio
Emilio hit its all-time SSA peak in 2024 at rank 152. The chart shape is the same first-time-arrival pattern as Emiliano and Matteo. A name that barely registered on American char…
- Baby commentary
Esther
Nearly 269,000 American Esthers exist on SSA record, with the name appearing on the chart every year since 1880. The 1918 peak at rank 25 sits more than a century in the past, but…
- Baby commentary
Ethan
Ethan is the name of one of those generational chart climbers nobody quite predicted. It sat outside the SSA top 200 in 1980. By 2002 it was top 10. The 2004 peak corresponds almo…
- Baby commentary
Evan
Evan peaked in 2007 at rank 31 and has slid steadily to 143 over the seventeen years since. The chart shape is one of the cleanest examples of a Welsh-derived name riding the broa…
- Baby commentary
Evangeline
Evangeline reached its current peak at rank 174 in 2024, the same year as the data snapshot, with about 34,750 cumulative American girls on SSA record. The name's chart life is al…
- Baby commentary
Everett
Everett climbed from rank 575 in 2000 to rank 83 in 2021 — a 490-position ascent in twenty-one years. That trajectory makes Everett one of the cleanest examples of a vintage surna…
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Editorial policy →
Topic selection, verification, corrections.
How we gather data
Methodology →
Sources, processing pipeline, limitations.