Browse our analysis articles on baby and pet names.
Coco. Iga. Aryna. Carlos. Two weeks of Australian Open broadcast every January train American parents to pronounce non-English names — and the SSA file picks up the residue.
CODA preceded Ruby's SSA bump. Past Lives preceded Nora. Sundance Grand Jury Prize films are the most reliable naming-prediction signal nobody is tracking. The 2026 winner is Josephine, currently at SSA position 98 and about to climb.
Golden Raye Mahomes joins Sterling Skye and Bronze Lavon. Three children, three precious metals, one carefully designed family system aligned with where naming is headed in 2026.
The NBA Cup creates a different kind of fame: short, prime-time, and stripped of team narrative. The Bucks' December title in Las Vegas was the cleanest test we have had of what that structure does to first names.
For twenty years dogs got cultural creativity and cats got formula. The 2025 license data shows cat names are now drawing from a wider pool than dog names. The naming gender gap is closing because the pet gender gap is closing.
Adults change their legal names more than ever before, and most do it in January. The names they pick aren't random — they reveal a generation that is, quietly, redoing the work their parents did at their birth.
Wild Card Weekend looks like a star showcase. The SSA data says role players move baby names more than quarterbacks do, because their names are still fresh enough to spread.
In 1995, one in 110 December babies was given a Christmas-themed name. In 2025, the ratio is one in 320. Christmas naming isn't being replaced with other holiday-themed names — it's being replaced with season-neutral names. The shift tells us something about how we now think about identity.
Music-genre clustering predicts baby names more accurately than education or income. Spotify Wrapped is the only large-scale dataset that captures it. If Spotify ever opened the genre-cluster API, SSA could be predicted a year in advance.
Senior-dog adoption is reshaping pet-name data, and almost nobody is tracking it. NYC's re-registration data shows adopted older dogs carry vintage names — Buddy, Ginger, Rusty — that are nearly absent from puppy registrations. Freida the dachshund is the public face of that shift.
Two consecutive Best in Show winners with French-coded names. The French pet name is no longer a coastal-millennial niche. The Thanksgiving broadcast finished a transition the data has been recording for years.
The first Wicked didn't move Elphaba — but it moved Lila, Linda, Madeline, and the broader Edwardian girls' register. The sequel is opening on a record holiday weekend, and the second-installment effect on naming is historically more durable than the first.