Browse our analysis articles on baby and pet names.
Bodega cats already have the most stable naming culture in any urban pet population — community-given, community-kept, often borrowed from the cashier's family. Legalization will formalize what was already a social institution.
The Dodgers won their second consecutive World Series and Yamamoto won the MVP. The naming question hidden underneath is which Japanese-origin first names actually move in SSA — and why a Yoshinobu bump will not happen, regardless of how good the season was.
Mothman is the breakout costume of Halloween 2025. Pet costume aesthetics tend to predict pet name aesthetics by about six months. What's being licensed in pet registration data right now suggests the cute-fluffy era of pet naming is finally starting to crack.
Shelters give black cats Halloween names to spark October adoptions. Most of those names get erased once the season ends. The question worth asking: which spooky names actually survive into the cat's permanent life?
AKC's 2025 numbers landed yesterday. Hank moved from 35 to 2 in a single year — the biggest jump AKC has ever recorded. The cleaner story is that we already knew this would happen. American baby data from 2018 told us seven years ago.
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.
The smart-collar UI is the new naming constraint. Lord Reginald Pawsworth III does not fit on a phone notification. Bear does. The IoT pet revolution is accidentally killing long fantasy names.
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.
Shelters batch-name dogs by alphabet, by season, by litter theme. Most of those names get erased within two weeks of adoption. The data shows which shelter names actually survive — and which the new family quietly rewrites.
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.