Browse our analysis articles on baby names.
UCLA beat South Carolina 79-51 last night for the women's NCAA championship. Lauren Betts won the Most Outstanding Player award. Lauren as a baby name has been declining for three decades. The question is whether a single MOP run can reverse a thirty-year curve.
Studies linking unusual names to negative outcomes get shared widely. The follow-up research that complicates those findings gets almost no attention. Parents weighing whether to give their child an unusual name deserve the full picture: what the research actually shows, what it does not show, and why context matters far more than unusualness itself.
Nova was a Zendesk competitor in 2018. Now it's a top-40 baby name. The aesthetic overlap between SaaS branding and nursery culture is not a coincidence.
Final Four broadcasts produce the year's highest concentrated naming residue. Five years of tournament data are enough to build a rough prediction model for which 2026 player first names will produce visible SSA-file movement.
MLB Opening Day is Thursday. The defending Dodgers will announce a starting lineup, and pet-naming licensing files will pick up the residue within thirty days — faster than any other sport.
White America is killing the middle name. Asian America is using it as a time capsule. The story of how heritage gets hidden in plain sight on a birth certificate.
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.
By the Elite Eight, the bracket is sparse enough that each remaining team gets disproportionate broadcast time. That asymmetric coverage produces measurable regional SSA lift in the school's home metro.
The men's NCAA Tournament tends to spike already-existing names. The women's tournament keeps generating new SSA-file entries. The 2026 Sweet 16 weekend is the latest test of a pattern that has been visible for at least five years.
Friday's first round put 12-seed High Point in front of millions of viewers in front of a national audience for the first time. Cinderella runs are short. The naming fingerprints they leave on county-level SSA data last for decades.
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.