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
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…
- Baby commentary
Pablo
Pablo currently sits at rank 406 with 49,617 total American boys carrying the name, peaking in 2006 during a broader era of mainstream Spanish-language adoption. The trajectory ha…
- Baby commentary
Paige
Paige carries 145,848 cumulative American girls on SSA record and currently sits at rank 375, with a 2003 peak. The chart traces a clean late-millennium arc: minimal pre-1980 pres…
- Baby commentary
Pedro
Pedro peaked in 2000 at rank 401 with 93,393 total American boys carrying the name, anchoring its place among the steady Spanish-language classics of the late twentieth century. T…
- Baby commentary
Philip
Philip is one of the few names in the English language with a genuinely royal, philosophical, and apostolic pedigree all running simultaneously. Philip of Macedon. Philip the Apos…
- Baby commentary
Phoenix
Phoenix carries 15,480 cumulative American girls on SSA record, sits at rank 421, and reached its peak in 2020. The chart shows minimal pre-2010 use as a girl name, a clean 2015-2…
- Baby commentary
Prince
Prince peaked in 2019 at rank 404 with 22,884 American boys carrying the name, a recent climb that reflects both the lingering cultural memory of musician Prince Rogers Nelson (19…
How we work
Editorial policy →
Topic selection, verification, corrections.
How we gather data
Methodology →
Sources, processing pipeline, limitations.