Browse our analysis articles on baby names.
Within 72 hours of Showgirl's release, baby-name search engines logged Opalite as a girls' candidate for the first time. Two of the album's track titles are doing two different kinds of cultural work, and parents are picking from both.
Karlie Kloss didn't invent her daughter's naming pattern. The single-syllable first name plus heirloom-place middle is the dominant formula in The Knot's high-bracket birth announcements, and SSA data confirms it's been climbing for seven years.
Rocki Irish is what happens when a celebrity reads naming trends correctly rather than inventing them. Rihanna's daughter packages three movements that have been visible in SSA data since 2018 — and the next two years will tell us how much further they go.
I sat with the SSA 2024 data for four months. Truce was not a one-off; it was the loudest member of an entire word-noun cohort — Pax, Amity, Dove, Solace — that was already present at lower frequencies. Re-reading the dataset late tells you what we missed in May.
The popular theory says hurricane names get ruined. The SSA record disagrees: Katrina and Sandy are the exceptions, not the rule. Erin is highly unlikely to follow them, and understanding why tells you something specific about how Americans actually grieve names.
Wednesday Season 2 Part 1 dropped this week. The first season moved the name Wednesday +35 percent in 2023 SSA data and accelerated Raven, Enid, and the broader gothic register. Whether any of that survives the second-season test is what the data will tell us in 2027.
Reed, Sue, Ben, Johnny. Marvel's Fantastic Four didn't pick those names — Stan Lee did, in 1961. The asymmetric way today's parents are willing to use them is one of the cleanest demonstrations of how vintage naming actually functions.
Connie Francis died at 87 just as TikTok rediscovered her 1962 record. The thing TikTok actually rediscovered isn't her. It's a sound register — short i, terminal ee, half-rhyme — that American baby naming has been quietly missing for fifty years.
After Snyderverse, Clark fell from the SSA top 320 to outside the top 800. The Gunn-era Superman is the first cultural product in years that could plausibly move it back. The data on superhero names suggests it won't be quick.
Pixar's Elio flopped on a $250M budget. The interesting reading isn't about Pixar — it's about what its title says about a decade of soft, vowel-heavy boy names that the algorithm finally optimized into exhaustion.
Championship MVP names follow a predictable timetable in SSA data. After OKC's Game 7 win, Shai is on a clock. The cleaner story is the surname Gilgeous-Alexander, which will not become a baby name no matter how good he gets.
The 2024 SSA release shows Sofia at #10. The first Spanish-spelled name to enter the American girls' top 10. The crossover Mateo started has accelerated.