The Age of Olives marches on! Oliver and Olivia continued their reign as the #1 names in England and Wales in the year 2020. That marks five straight years of dominance for the matching pair, a sign of the power of sound in modern baby name style. On the girls’ […]
There are far, far more names than we imagine. Last year, over 30,000 different names were recorded in the US national baby name statistics. Yet those stats only include names given to 5 or more boys or girls in a single year. What about the ultra-rare names? How many names […]
Some days, the y-axis feels like my enemy. I’ll be tracing a name’s past popularity on a graph, when the history cuts off abruptly at a point 100 or so years ago. Too many questions about the past are left unanswered. Now, though, we have an opportunity to take a […]
What makes names so powerful? A recent thread on tumblr offered one answer, based on connection. Some excerpts: “u ever think abt how some names have been used for centuries, millenniums even…like how many times has the earth heard a mother calling, ‘alexander!’…how many times have the stars caught a […]
The Reddit post earned thousands of upvotes and comments. Strangers pointed me to it; friends and family pointed me to it. The data was right there in a graph, the trend unmistakable. And yet the name story wasn’t true. The baby name Karen did not just plummet into obscurity, pushed […]
Olivia unites us, Theodore divides us, and Oliver is the King in the North. Those are some of the takeaways from a new look at the most popular baby names in every US State in 2020. Olivia, the nation’s top girl’s name, ranks in the top 5 in every single […]
2020 was a year like no other. In a time of loss, division and moral reckoning, the fastest rising names of the year were not hot new celebrity names, but memorials. Basketball superstar Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter Gianna died in a helicopter crash in January, 2020. Kobe was […]
Just in: the official ranking of the most popular baby names in the USA for the year 2020. BOYS GIRLS 1 Liam Olivia 2 Noah Emma 3 Oliver Ava 4 Elijah Charlotte 5 William Sophia 6 James Amelia 7 Benjamin Isabella 8 Lucas Mia 9 Henry Evelyn 10 Alexander […]
Endings are the overlooked keys to baby name style. The final “t” is the power behind fashionable names like Scarlett and Violet. The final “r” lends names like Cooper and Sawyer extra energy. Yet we alphabetize names in the standard order, starting at the beginning. Here’s a chance to give […]
Let’s talk about a rare boy’s name. Really rare. A name that isn’t ranked in the current top 1000, or even the top 2000. A name rarer than Theophilus, or Dinero, or Supreme. A name like Brad. Among grown men, of course, Brad is hardly a curiosity. It was a […]
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