Expert guides, trends, and data-driven analysis on baby names.
There is a certain type of name that sounds like it comes with a summer house in the Hamptons and a boarding school blazer. Not flashy. Not trendy. Just... quietly, confidently expensive. These are the Old Money names, and they are absolutely having a moment.
Something fundamental is shifting in how American parents think about names. The most interesting names of 2026 aren't the ones that are clearly girl names or clearly boy names — they're the ones that could go either way. Gender-neutral naming is no longer a niche preference. It's a mainstream movement.
Every year, thousands of baby names move up and down the charts in small, predictable increments. Then there are the names that break the laws of naming physics — that go from nowhere to everywhere in the space of a single year. These are the names that tell the story of who we were, what we watched, and what we feared.
Once upon a time, Ashley was a name for boys. So were Leslie, Beverly, and Shannon. Then something happened. These names started showing up on girls, and within a generation, the transformation was complete. The Great Gender Flip is one of the most fascinating patterns in American naming history — and it's still happening right now.
Something has shifted in what Americans want boys to be — and it's showing up in what they name them. The era of Max, Rex, and Stone is giving way to something gentler: Jasper, Ezra, Elliot, Arlo. Soft sounds, literary references, quiet confidence. The Soft Boy Name Revolution is real, it's data-driven, and it says something important about masculinity in 2026.
The first name gets all the attention. But the middle name is where the real creative freedom lives — and the combination of the two is what your child will hear at graduation, at their wedding, and whenever they've done something wrong. Getting this pairing right is worth some thought.
You want to name your baby in honor of your grandmother Gertrude. The problem: you don't actually want a child named Gertrude. This tension — between the love you feel for someone and the reality of the name they carry — is one of the most common naming dilemmas parents face. Here are the ways out.
Michigan beat UConn 69-63 in Lucas Oil Stadium last night. Second-year coach Dusty May lifted the trophy in his program's first NCAA championship since 1989. Country-coded coach first names like Dusty punch above their weight in post-tournament naming residue.
Look at the top 10 baby names from 2015 and count the vowels. Emma, Olivia, Sophia, Ava, Noah, Liam, Ethan, Lucas — there is something structurally different about 2010s name aesthetics compared to the Brittany/Tyler/Cody era before it.
The names changed before the laws did. Cross-referencing SSA data with immigration statistics uncovers a 3-5 year signal that policy analysts consistently miss.
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.