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
Maliyah
Maliyah is the Hawaiian-inflected spelling of a sound that American parents have loved in multiple forms — Malia, Amalia, Maliah. With nearly 15,000 recorded births and a 2009 pea…
- Baby commentary
Mallory
Mallory carries 58,213 cumulative American girls on SSA record, sits at rank 412, and reached its peak in 1986. The chart shows a sharp mid-1980s climb that lines up almost exactl…
- Baby commentary
Margo
Margo peaked in 1954 and currently sits at #545 , with over 26,000 recorded bearers. It's the French spelling of Margot — which is itself a diminutive of Marguerite, which comes f…
- Baby commentary
Mario
Mario peaked in 1980 at rank 398 with 150,569 total American boys carrying the name, a substantial cumulative count that places it among the steady late-twentieth-century Italian-…
- Baby commentary
Marlee
Marlee sits at #509 with just over 17,000 recorded bearers — a compact number for a name that feels much more established than that. Its Old English roots connect it to a landscap…
- Baby commentary
Maryam
Maryam carries 12,974 cumulative American girls on SSA record and currently sits at rank 390, with a fresh 2024 peak. The chart traces a clean modern climb: minimal pre-2000 Ameri…
- Baby commentary
Mavis
Mavis peaked in 1927 and has over 22,000 recorded American births — which means there's a generation of grandmothers and great-grandmothers named Mavis, and their names are now re…
- Baby commentary
Maximo
Maximo peaked in 2023 and holds at current rank #595 , with 8,712 total SSA bearers. It's the Spanish form of Maximus — the Latin superlative "greatest" — and it has found a growi…
- Baby commentary
Melissa
Melissa carries 759,386 cumulative American girls on SSA record and currently sits at rank 378, with a 1979 peak. The chart traces a textbook Gen-X arc: minimal pre-1960 presence,…
- Baby commentary
Meredith
Meredith is Welsh — genuinely, deeply Welsh, not Welsh by way of England or America — and it peaked in the U.S. in 1980 before entering a long, slow decline that has barely paused…
- Baby commentary
Michelle
Michelle carries 815,849 cumulative American girls on SSA record, sits at rank 409 today, and reached its peak in 1969. The chart traces one of the cleanest mid-century arcs in Am…
- Baby commentary
Miley
Miley carries 14,797 cumulative American girls on SSA record and currently sits at rank 387, with a 2008 peak. The chart traces an unmistakable single-celebrity arc: essentially z…
- Baby commentary
Mohamed
Mohamed is one of the most important names in human history — it's an alternate transliteration of Muhammad, the name of the Prophet of Islam and statistically one of the most com…
- Baby commentary
Morgan
Morgan was a boys' name in Wales for a thousand years before American parents decided it belonged to girls. That shift happened in the 1980s and 1990s and was essentially complete…
- Baby commentary
Moses
Moses is the English form of Moshe — the prophet drawn from the Nile, the lawgiver, the man who spoke with God on Mount Sinai. It's one of the most storied names in all of human h…
- Baby commentary
Mya
Mya carries 61,595 cumulative American girls on SSA record and currently sits at rank 366, with a 2009 peak. The chart traces a clean late-1990s-and-2000s arc: minimal pre-1998 pr…
- Baby commentary
Nasir
Nasir peaked in 2019 at rank 448 with 17,290 total American boys carrying the name, a contemporary high that reflects steady ongoing adoption in African American and Muslim Americ…
- Baby commentary
Nellie
Nellie peaked in 1918 and carries over 152,000 recorded bearers — which means it was genuinely popular for most of the early twentieth century before fading for nearly a hundred y…
- Baby commentary
Nikolai
Nikolai peaked in 2016 and holds at current rank #589 , with 10,550 total SSA bearers. It's the Russian form of Nicholas — carrying the same meaning, the same patron saint, the sa…
- Baby commentary
Oaklee
Oaklee peaked in 2023 and sits at #518 with just over 5,000 recorded bearers. It's a spelling variant of Oakley — the surname-turned-given-name that most Americans associate with…
How we work
Editorial policy →
Topic selection, verification, corrections.
How we gather data
Methodology →
Sources, processing pipeline, limitations.