Expert guides, trends, and data-driven analysis on baby names.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For many Asian-American immigrant families, names like Ethan and Emma aren't just popular choices. They're calculated hedges against a discriminatory world. Here's what the data shows.
If you were born in the late 1980s with three Jessicas in your class, you have almost certainly ruled Jessica out for your daughter. That instinct turns out to be one of the most reliable forces in baby naming history: each generation systematically avoids the names of their own cohort.
I built a baby name database as a side project, and somewhere in the process of cleaning 140 years of SSA data, the numbers stopped feeling like data and started feeling like a national autobiography.
Every year, Sofía loses a tilde — and a family tells a story about America. Three spellings, three generations, one name at the center of bicultural identity.