Trends, origin guides, and inspiration for naming your baby.
Logan, Cameron, Isla, Mackenzie — American naming runs on Scottish surnames and islands, mostly without noticing. A guide to the clans, the places, and the Gaelic originals Scotland kept for itself.
Esther, Jasmine, Cyrus, Roxanne — Persian names reached English through the Bible, the garden, and the poets. A guide to a naming tradition built on light, flowers, and royal memory.
Announcing a name before the birth invites every opinion in your life to weigh in on a hypothesis. Announcing it attached to a baby invites them to meet a person. The difference decides the question.
Dylan, Owen, Morgan, Rhys — America has been naming its children in Welsh for decades without quite noticing. A guide to the language that kept its names as living words, and the ones still waiting to be found.
We read ten years of American birth records — 2015 to 2024, every name, both sexes — looking for the shifts that don't show up in a top-ten list. The sound of American names is changing, and the direction is unmistakable.
A patient look through a hundred years of name popularity data reveals four characteristic curve shapes, each with different implications for parents choosing a name today.
The due date arrives this week. Most babies do not. A guide to the meaning of the due date, the labor signs that count, and the names that suit a meeting now imminent.
Week twelve is the threshold. The fourth trimester ends, the baby officially stops being a newborn, and a small person with a personality steps out of the fog. A guide to the milestone, the reflection, and eight names that fit.
Liam, Noah, Owen, Mason, Logan, Hudson. The dominant rhythm in modern boys' naming is a single metrical foot — the trochee — and once you hear it, you cannot stop hearing it.
Some names survive every fashion cycle. Some get stranded in a decade and don’t make it out. The difference comes down to a few structural sound properties — most of which are predictable once you know what to listen for.
The "does it rhyme with the last name" test catches maybe a quarter of the actual problems. A field guide to the other three quarters, written for a parent who wants to know what is making a full name feel slightly off.
Roughly one in five parents reports name regret in the first year. The patterns are surprisingly consistent, and most of them are avoidable with a different process up front.
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