Today’s Questions of the Week focus on the upcoming Social Security lists of 2010’s most popular names. 　　The announcements of the Social Security Administration’s popularity lists for 2010 are almost upon us.  So, time to place your bets, ladies and gentlemen, on what will be revealed. 　　What do you think will...

　　Isabella and Jacob are still the top names in the U.S., according to the official statistics for 2010 released this morning by the Social Security Administration. 　　With a Top 10 list that was extraordinarily stable — Aiden was the only name that moved on, with Joshua falling off — most...

　　I was sitting here last week, making a list of what I was thinking of as Modern Hero Names – you know, like Palin and Winslet – when the news came in about the names Mariah Carey had chosen for her newborn twins. She’d given her daughter the Old Man...

　　Question of the Week: What were your responses to the new Social Security list of Popular Names 2010? 　　Last week we asked for your predictions of the popular names 2010, and some of you came up with very spot-on forecasts—a special shout-out to names4real for anticipating the rise of Bentley (who is shown...

　　Scanning the popularity charts of some of the current most popular and stylish baby names (yeah, that’s how I spend my spare time), I noticed something fascinating the other day.  Many of them – Ava, Ella, Peyton, Aiden, Emmett, even number one Isabella – were at the very bottom of...

　　We’re so pleased to announce that starting today, Appellation Mountain‘s Abby Sandel will be presenting a regular baby name news recap and analysis every Monday. 　　If you’re a Nameberry aficionado, you might recall that this column started out as a week in review, then morphed into a more conventional list of names based...

　　Click here for the Top 200 Baby Names of 2011What are the hottest new baby names this year? Based on an analysis of over 23 million page views at Nameberry since January, we’ve pegged these choices as the Hottest Names of 2011. 　　It’s a surprising list, driven by unexpected celebrities,...

　　If you were naming a baby in 1911, you certainly wouldn’t be thinking about the hottest baby name trends or what was cool or hip.  Ah, those were the days! 　　But it is interesting to look back and see what patterns were in evidence then, which names—some of them really surprising—have obeyed the...

　　Some stylish names share a first initial: Vowel names are particularly popular right now, for instance. Other times, it’s a rhythm or ending sound: Boys’ names with two syllables that end in N or R are big these days. 　　Still other fashionable names share an ethnic origin such as Irish...

　　Have you noticed the sudden pop in popularity of girls’ names starting with the happy-go-lucky syllable ‘Ha’—some on them shamelessly stolen from the boys?  Caught in the spotlight by two recent high-profile starbabies, Harper Seven Beckham and Jessica Alba’s Haven Warren, this is among the baby name trends that seem...

　　The year before Nicole Richie, who’s mainly famous for being famous, named her first child Harlow Winter Kate, that Golden Age of Hollywood first name was given to only 28 baby girls. 　　In 2008, the year Richie gave birth in January, that number shot up to 133, more than doubling...

　　When Mike Myers named his son Spike recently, there were several comments on our Nameberry Facebook page along the lines of: “Did his wife have a puppy?” and “Bit doggy for me.”  Not very kind, perhaps, but it does raise the subject of the blurring of the line between human...

　　Once upon a time, in the now distant past, popularity lists–particularly for boys–were teeming with names starting with the letter ‘W’. 　　In 1920, for example, there were twenty-seven of them in the boys’ Top 500, including every conceivable appendage to the first syllable Wil. Aside from the eternal William, there were Willie,...