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
Channing
Channing ranks #1,696 in American baby names, with 7,205 children — boys and girls both — receiving this name across SSA records, a dual-gender spread that reflects the surname-na…
- Baby commentary
Hardin
Hardin has 1,261 births in the SSA records with a peak in 2021 — and almost certainly owes a significant share of those births to Hardin Scott, the brooding, book-loving protagoni…
- Baby commentary
Huck
Huck has just 1,488 recorded U.S. births in the SSA database — one of the most literary one-syllable names in American naming history, loaded with adventure and completely free of…
- Baby commentary
Ignatius
Ignatius has 3,975 recorded U.S. births in the SSA database — a name of extraordinary intellectual and spiritual weight that has never been common, and is therefore exactly as rar…
- Baby commentary
Jurnee
Jurnee ranks #1,705 in American baby names, with 4,430 children on record — a name that transforms the English word "journey" into something visual and intimate, and that carries…
- Baby commentary
Stiles
Stiles has 879 recorded births in the SSA data with its peak in 2024 — the most recent peak in this batch — and virtually all of those births owe a debt to one fictional character…
- Baby commentary
Tyrell
Tyrell ranks #1,703 in American baby names, with 15,987 boys on record — a name that arrived in America through medieval French nobility, gained momentum through African American…
- Baby commentary
Venus
Venus has 9,858 recorded U.S. births in the SSA database — a name that has radiated beauty, power, and athletic excellence for millennia, and in the 21st century belongs unmistaka…
- Baby commentary
Xion
Xion has been given to 912 boys in the United States since 1999, with its peak arriving in 2024 when 95 boys received the name — a trajectory that tracks almost perfectly with the…
- Baby commentary
Amiah
Amiah sits at rank 1,671 with 4,681 total SSA uses — a name that has grown steadily since the early 2000s, driven partly by phonetic proximity to the enormously popular Amia, Amay…
- Baby commentary
Asia
Asia has 32,404 births in the SSA record and currently ranks at 1,689 — a number that reflects a significant drop from the name's peak in the 1990s and early 2000s, when it was a…
- Baby commentary
Azula
Azula ranks at #1,644 with 600 total births — one of the most striking examples in recent SSA data of a fictional villain's name crossing into genuine baby name use, carried entir…
- Baby commentary
Caitlin
Something happened to Caitlin around 1988. The name, which had been climbing steadily since the mid-1970s, hit its SSA peak that year and became one of the defining girls' names o…
- Baby commentary
Chevy
Chevy ranks at #1,660 in the SSA database with 3,678 total uses across both genders — a name that carries the weight of American car culture, a beloved comedian, and a medieval En…
- Baby commentary
Cosmo
Cosmo peaked in 2022. Not 1952, not 1985 — 2022. That single data point tells you almost everything about where this name has been and where it is going. With 2,869 total SSA birt…
- Baby commentary
Deegan
Deegan has 3,379 total SSA uses at rank 1,674 — an Irish-origin surname-name that has been threading its way into American baby naming over the past two decades, carried along by…
- Baby commentary
Destin
Destin has accumulated 6,013 births in the SSA record, split across both male and female registrations, and currently sits at rank 1,684. The numbers tell a story of a name that a…
- Baby commentary
Fred
Fred has 343,576 births in the SSA record — a staggering historical total — and now sits at rank 1,686, a number that marks just how far this once-dominant name has receded. The s…
- Baby commentary
Hansel
Hansel ranks at #1,661 in the SSA database with 3,529 recorded uses — a German name that most Americans know primarily from a fairy tale, but which functions as a legitimate given…
- Baby commentary
Izayah
Izayah has 4,178 total uses in the SSA record at rank 1,676 — a phonetically respelled variant of Isaiah that has carved out its own small but steady niche among parents who want…
How we work
Editorial policy →
Topic selection, verification, corrections.
How we gather data
Methodology →
Sources, processing pipeline, limitations.