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
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…
- Baby commentary
Finn
Finn peaked in 2017 at rank 167 and now sits at 198. The chart line shows a name that climbed steadily through the 2000s and 2010s on the Celtic-revival wave, hit its peak, and ha…
- Baby commentary
Freya
Freya is the Norse goddess of love, fertility, war, and death — an unusually broad portfolio for any deity, and an unusually rich one for a baby name. The current rank of 159 sits…
- Baby commentary
Genevieve
Genevieve has 123,100 cumulative American girls on SSA record dating back to the early 20th century, with a 1918 peak that put it inside the top 100. The current rank of 165 refle…
- Baby commentary
Georgia
Few American girls' names carry an all-time SSA peak (rank 84 in 1947) that sits more than 75 years before their current position. Georgia does. The name has been quietly climbing…
- Baby commentary
Grayson
Grayson was outside the SSA top 1000 until 1984. By 2017 it was top 30. That is one of the steepest climbs in modern American boy-naming, and unlike Liam or Aiden, Grayson did it…
- Baby commentary
Harper
Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960, and for the next forty-five years, almost no one used Harper as a first name. Then David and Victoria Beckham named their daugh…
- Baby commentary
Henry
Eight kings of England, two American presidents, and a 19th-century rank in the SSA top 10 every single year from 1880 to 1904. Henry is the rare American boys' name that has neve…
- Baby commentary
Hudson
Hudson didn't exist as a U.S. boys' name in any meaningful sense before 1995. It entered the SSA top 1000 that year at #786, and in 2024 it hit its all-time peak inside the top 25…
- Baby commentary
Ian
Ian peaked in 2005 at rank 65 and has held within ten positions of that peak for the entire two decades since. That kind of flatline (almost no climb, almost no decline) is data s…
- Baby commentary
Iris
Iris peaked in 2024 at rank 71, which is the highest the name has ever held in continuous SSA records. The previous high was in 1900, when Iris briefly entered the top 200 during…
- Baby commentary
Isaac
Isaac means "he laughs" in Hebrew. The biblical Sarah laughed when she was told she would conceive a son in old age, and the child was named for that laughter. Three thousand year…
- Baby commentary
Isaiah
Isaiah peaked in 2006 at rank 39, then did something most biblical names don't: it held. Nineteen years later it sits at rank 56, having dropped only modestly while neighbours lik…
How we work
Editorial policy →
Topic selection, verification, corrections.
How we gather data
Methodology →
Sources, processing pipeline, limitations.