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
- Pet commentary
Rowan
Rowan is a nature name — the rowan tree, known for its red berries and association with protection against evil in Celtic and Norse traditions — that has become one of the quietly…
- Pet commentary
Ruffles
Ruffles shows up 83 times at rank 1320 — a name that's doing one of two things: describing a dog's physical coat texture, or making a potato chip joke. At this tier in the registr…
- Pet commentary
Ryan
Ryan is one of those solid Irish surnames that crossed into first-name use so completely that most people forget it started as a family name. At rank 1261 in the pet registry, it…
- Pet commentary
Sierra
Sierra lands at rank 1373 in the pet registry, a nature-geography name that peaked in human usage in the 1990s and has since migrated extensively into pet naming. The mountain ran…
- Pet commentary
Smith
Smith at rank 1403 is a surname operating as a first name, and the specific appeal here is its extraordinary plainness. Smith is the most common surname in the English-speaking wo…
- Pet commentary
Sol
Sol is the Latin and Spanish word for sun, and as a pet name it carries that warm, essential, life-giving quality in a single clean syllable. At rank 1309 with a neutral gender le…
- Pet commentary
Sunday
Sunday is a day-of-the-week name with a specific quality that Monday through Saturday can't match: it carries light, rest, and the particular sweetness of a day that belongs to no…
- Pet commentary
Tanner
Tanner is an occupational surname that migrated into first-name territory in the 1990s, peaked on kids born around 1994, and now shows up on dogs who belong to owners who grew up…
- Pet commentary
Timber
Timber is a nature-anchored name with a specific outdoor quality — it evokes lumber, forests, and the satisfying sound of a tree falling. At rank 1291 with a male lean, it belongs…
- Pet commentary
Tokyo
Tokyo at rank 1385 is one of the more culturally layered city names in the pet registry. It has two competing sources: the Japanese capital with its specific urban aesthetic, and…
- Pet commentary
Tori
Tori registers 82 times at rank 1335 on female pets — a bright, bouncy name that functions as a nickname for Victoria while also standing perfectly well on its own. It's a name th…
- Pet commentary
Trudy
Trudy hits rank 1364 in the pet registry, a name that sits in the same vintage-eccentric pocket as Phyllis, Edna, and Myrtle — names that were grandmothers' names a generation ago…
- Pet commentary
Tuna
Tuna is a name with genuine internet pedigree. The Instagram-famous Chihuahua mix known as @tunameltsmyheart accumulated millions of followers in the early 2010s, turning a slight…
- Pet commentary
Zora
Zora is a Slavic name meaning dawn, and it has the rare quality of being both historically significant and genuinely underused — a combination that pet owners in the literary-mind…
- Articleanalysis
Kasai Just Jumped 1,108 Spots: What Happens When a Name Goes Viral
The 2025 SSA data is out and Kasai's rise is the story of the year. History shows viral names follow a predictable lifecycle — here's how to read it.
·9 min read
- Articleanalysis
The LaMelo Effect: How NBA Stars Are Rewriting the Rules of Baby Naming
LaMelo Ball just named his son LaOne. NamesPop data shows La- prefix names hit bottom in 2015 — and are now rising again at 34% since 2022.
·9 min read
- Baby commentary
Adhara
Adhara is the name of the second-brightest star in the constellation Canis Major — and in ultraviolet light, it's the brightest object in the sky other than the sun. It's also an…
- Baby commentary
Alexis
In 1998, Alexis was one of the most-given girls' names in America — a moment that's easy to forget now that the name has slipped to #506 . With over 343,000 recorded bearers, it c…
- Baby commentary
Alicia
Alicia carries 230,104 cumulative American girls on SSA record, sits at rank 436, and reached its peak in 1984. The chart traces a sharp 1970s climb, a sustained early-1980s plate…
- Baby commentary
Alijah
Alijah sits at rank 430 with 13,567 total American boys carrying the name, peaking in 2021 as a contemporary respelling of Elijah. The trajectory shows the name climbing through t…
How we work
Editorial policy →
Topic selection, verification, corrections.
How we gather data
Methodology →
Sources, processing pipeline, limitations.