Over the past decade, we’ve seen starbabies named WyattOliver and WyattIsabelle, Babyberries called HarborAlister and HarborAurelia, and unisex options like Skyler and Peyton, Arrow and Linden crossing gender lines in both directions. And the number of babies receiving truly gender-neutral names (one with at least a 35:65 gender split) is up more than 60% compared to a decade ago.
What will be the most popular baby names of 2028? Which names will rise the fastest and which will fall? What unexpected names do we see gaining popularity? And what major baby name trends do we see emerging in the ten years ahead?
We analyzed the Social Security data to create projections for the next ten years of baby names. The exclusive lists that follow are based on our statistical calculations.
In 2008, shortly after Pam and I moved our shared baby name expertise from the book world into the virtual universe, we inaugurated a tradition of collaborating towards the end of every year on a blog of our predictions for the following year’s baby name trends, based on the cultural shifts we observed, what was happening in society, politics, the arts, and Hollywood.
We pinpointed certain categories, such as an overall big-picture trend, greatest pop culture influence, most surprising comeback name, new trends inspired by a celebrity name, most fashionable vowel and consonant, ethnic name group most likely to rise, newest old people names, and—one of our favorites– a trend ready to jump the shark.
Here are ten trends we predicted that may have seemed outrageous at the time and how they played out.
We launched Nameberry in October 2008, the same month the economy collapsed and a few weeks before BarackObama was elected president.
In that decade, 40 million babies were born in the US, and 235 million people viewed 1.5 billion pages of our site. The Social Security Administration recorded 56,000 baby names, and Nameberry’s database cimbed to 70,000 names, along with nearly 500 curated lists, 3728 blogs, over 180,000 lists created by visitors, and 3,386,947 forum posts.
