About

Name Pop started because my partner and I are hunting for our first child's name (baby coming soon! :D). Like a lot of expectant parents, we kept going back to the SSA's baby name site to look up names and trends. One night my partner was clicking through it year by year, just to see how long “Michael” stayed the top name.

I'm a software engineer by trade, and I thought it would be fun to build something more interactive for us to explore names with. Every feature here was born (ha!) from a question we kept asking each other:

• How popular is it, and is it on the way up? Popularity charts it every year since 1880 and maps where in the US it's loved most.
• What does it look like written down? See it writes the name out by hand.
• How is it said? Hear it says it out loud.
• Where does it come from? Story has its roots and famous namesakes.
• How else could we spell it? Spellings lists names that sound the same.
• And what about a sibling someday? Pairings suggests names that go with it.

Every rank and count comes from the Social Security Administration's baby name records: every first name given to at least five babies in a year, from 1880 to 2025, nationally and by state.

Where a name comes from is quoted word for word from Wiktionary, and its famous namesakes come from Wikidata. Nothing written about a name is made up or written by AI. If the sources don't have an answer, neither does Name Pop.

A few things are best guesses: the voices in Hear it are computer-generated, and pairings and spelling groups come from simple, fixed rules.

I designed the site with Claude Design, and Claude Code wrote the code, with me steering: deciding what to build, reviewing every change, and choosing what to leave out.

It's built with Next.js and React and hosted on Vercel.

No accounts, no cookies, and nothing ties the names you look up to you. See the privacy page for more.