Browse our analysis articles on baby and pet names.
National baby name rankings hide as much as they reveal. Some names are effectively regional phenomena — popular in one state, unknown in another — mapped onto persistent cultural, religious, and demographic fault lines.
Middle names seem like a given — almost every American has one. But that universality is surprisingly recent, and the forces that created it are now quietly reversing. This piece traces the middle name from Protestant class marker to near-universal convention and examines what today's trends suggest about its future.
For bilingual families, choosing a baby name is a negotiation between two phonological systems, two sets of family expectations, and two cultural identities with very different ideas about what a name should do.
Brooklyn was a working-class borough before it became a fashionable baby name. That reversal is not coincidence — it is name gentrification, a predictable process by which names travel upward through class strata, losing their original social context along the way.
Choosing a baby name feels permanent — because it is. Yet surveys suggest nearly one in five parents experience meaningful regret about the name they chose, not because the name is objectively wrong, but because naming is an act of identity projection loaded with social pressure and impossible expectations.