Expert guides, trends, and data-driven analysis on baby names.
Sarah Hughes, Tara Lipinski, Kristi Yamaguchi, Peggy Fleming. Every American women's figure-skating Olympic gold medalist before now has had an English-coded first name that the SSA file responded to. Alysa Liu just won, and the pattern faces its first non-English test.
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.
Anthony Edwards took home the Kobe Bryant All-Star MVP trophy last night with 32 points in the new three-team round-robin format. Three different naming archetypes — Anthony, Kobe, Edwards-as-given-name — met on a single award stage.
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.
The Bad Bunny halftime performance was the NFL's most globally streamed halftime ever and the largest single-event exposure to Spanish-language naming that non-Latino American parents will get in 2026.
Seattle's 29-13 win in Super Bowl LX last night gave Kenneth Walker III the MVP trophy, with a 152-yard rushing performance. Kenneth has been declining for three decades. A non-QB Super Bowl MVP attached to a classic name is a rare cultural reset.
Last night's Olympic opening ceremony walked eighteen countries' naming conventions in front of American viewers. The Winter Games' naming influence is measurably weaker than the Summer Games', and the gap deserves a closer look.
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.
MLB free agency moves star first names across American cities in a way no other major sport allows. The 2026 winter signings are seeding regional SSA ripples that will be visible in birth records by next fall.
Wayne, Mario, Sidney, Connor, Cale, Macklin. Hockey names diffuse into American naming on a five-to-seven-year delay no other sport has. The 2026 All-Star Game in Toronto is the test for whether that lag is closing.
Comeback narratives produce stronger naming spikes than breakout narratives — they accumulate audience attention over a longer arc. JuJu Watkins's 2026 return from ACL surgery is the comeback every name forecaster should be watching.