Browse our analysis articles on baby and pet names.
Pet names attached to fictional characters work because the characters stay still. Mufasa is no longer staying still. Owners didn't consent to the prequel.
We have data on names that rise after political wins. We have very little on names that travel with political losses. The category deserves attention.
Quincy Jones died at 91. His name's peak in Black American naming matches his cultural peak almost exactly. Almost no one has written it down.
Freddie Freeman hit the World Series' first walk-off grand slam. The name 'Freddie' has been falling for 90 years. The reasons aren't time-related.
A year after Saltburn, Felix is at its highest American ranking in 80 years. Parents are betting that 'lucky' will outlast a fictional bathtub.
Two weeks after Helene struck, displaced shelter animals are arriving in Virginia and Maryland. Adopters are giving them names that record the disaster.
Olivia Munn announced her daughter Méi June via surrogate. Reddit called it clumsy. The name actually does the inheritance work Munn's body could not.
A Thai pygmy hippo named for a meatball became the world's most-photographed animal in September. American shelters are watching whether non-English names finally cross over.
Shōgun took 18 Emmys and held the line on Japanese surname-first order in subtitles. English-language coverage flipped it within hours of the wins. The history is older than this.
James Earl Jones died on September 9. The names he carried — Mufasa, Vader, Kunta Kinte — were never neutral. They were vessels for a specific gravitas.
Rover's 2024 National Dog Day report finally crowns the mutt. The naming data makes the cultural shift visible: mutts are getting human names at unprecedented rates.
Charli XCX's lime green album turned a spelling variant into a cultural unit of measure. The naming consequences will show up in next May's SSA release.