Browse our analysis articles on baby and pet names.
You would not name siblings Grayson and Moonbeam — most people understand that instinctively. But the unspoken rules of sibling naming run much deeper than avoiding obvious clashes, and understanding them explains why some sibling sets feel intuitively right while others feel slightly off.
Fido is nearly extinct as a dog name. In NYC licensing data, dogs named Theodore outnumber dogs named Fido. The shift from Rex and Spot to Luna and Charlie is not just a naming trend — it's a structural change.
Cross the Rio Grande and the #1 name flips overnight. SSA state-level data reveals naming patterns in the Southwest that national charts completely miss.
America is less religiously affiliated than at any point in modern history. Yet Noah has led the boys' name charts for much of this decade, and Elijah, Levi, Gabriel, and Isaiah are all top 20. This apparent contradiction is real, and it is interesting.
My rabbit is named Money. I did not name him that because I prioritize finances over affection — it was a joke that became a term of endearment. But the question of what pet names reveal about how we relate to animals is a real one.
For many Asian-American immigrant families, names like Ethan and Emma aren't just popular choices. They're calculated hedges against a discriminatory world. Here's what the data shows.
If you were born in the late 1980s with three Jessicas in your class, you have almost certainly ruled Jessica out for your daughter. That instinct turns out to be one of the most reliable forces in baby naming history: each generation systematically avoids the names of their own cohort.
I built a baby name database as a side project, and somewhere in the process of cleaning 140 years of SSA data, the numbers stopped feeling like data and started feeling like a national autobiography.
Every year, Sofía loses a tilde — and a family tells a story about America. Three spellings, three generations, one name at the center of bicultural identity.
When Gwyneth Paltrow named her daughter Apple in 2004, it seemed inevitable that Apple would enter the mainstream. It never did. I kept finding the same pattern in SSA data while building NamesPop: celebrity baby names rarely surge immediately — when they spread at all, it takes years.
Netflix A/B tests thumbnails. Your baby's name has no test cohort — so here's the brand strategy framework that makes the decision easier.
Kade and Liam have nothing in common etymologically. But say them aloud and most people will agree: one feels harder, the other softer. This is sound symbolism, a well-documented psycholinguistic phenomenon in which phonemes carry meaning independent of etymology.