Expert guides, trends, and data-driven analysis on baby names.
In 1995, one in 110 December babies was given a Christmas-themed name. In 2025, the ratio is one in 320. Christmas naming isn't being replaced with other holiday-themed names — it's being replaced with season-neutral names. The shift tells us something about how we now think about identity.
Music-genre clustering predicts baby names more accurately than education or income. Spotify Wrapped is the only large-scale dataset that captures it. If Spotify ever opened the genre-cluster API, SSA could be predicted a year in advance.
When Stranger Things launched in 2016, Eleven was a number. By 2024, eleven baby girls had been given the name. The series finale, dropping over the next month, will close the most successful natural experiment in number-naming American culture has ever run.
The first Wicked didn't move Elphaba — but it moved Lila, Linda, Madeline, and the broader Edwardian girls' register. The sequel is opening on a record holiday weekend, and the second-installment effect on naming is historically more durable than the first.
The Dodgers won their second consecutive World Series and Yamamoto won the MVP. The naming question hidden underneath is which Japanese-origin first names actually move in SSA — and why a Yoshinobu bump will not happen, regardless of how good the season was.
Annie Hall opened in 1977 with a woman wearing menswear and answering to a nickname instead of her formal name. Forty-eight years later, the SSA top 100 is full of girls named Annie, Charlie, Frankie, and Sammie. Keaton wrote the warrant for that.
Within 72 hours of Showgirl's release, baby-name search engines logged Opalite as a girls' candidate for the first time. Two of the album's track titles are doing two different kinds of cultural work, and parents are picking from both.
Karlie Kloss didn't invent her daughter's naming pattern. The single-syllable first name plus heirloom-place middle is the dominant formula in The Knot's high-bracket birth announcements, and SSA data confirms it's been climbing for seven years.
Rocki Irish is what happens when a celebrity reads naming trends correctly rather than inventing them. Rihanna's daughter packages three movements that have been visible in SSA data since 2018 — and the next two years will tell us how much further they go.
Names attached to public tragedies almost never collapse. They do something more interesting: they pause in the demographic closest to the grief, while accelerating elsewhere. The historical record on cohort effects is the cleanest predictor of what happens to Charlie next.
I sat with the SSA 2024 data for four months. Truce was not a one-off; it was the loudest member of an entire word-noun cohort — Pax, Amity, Dove, Solace — that was already present at lower frequencies. Re-reading the dataset late tells you what we missed in May.
I don't believe in the parlor game of celebrities deciding what we name our babies. But Swift-Kelce will be a generational test of one specific question: does the most-watched American couple go literary or sporty? My bet is on literary, with a smart reference.