Today, Explained - What's in a name?

Episode Date: July 19, 2026

Jalen and Olivia and Liam and Ailany. We look at what makes a name top the popularity charts. This episode was produced by Danielle Hewitt, edited by Jenny Lawton, fact-checked by Sarah Schweppe, engineered by David Tatasciore, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. Two babies, just a few hours old, lie side by side in a hospital in Halle, Germany. Photo by Waltraud Grubitzsch/dpa-Zentralbild/ZB via Getty Images. If you have a question, give us a call at 1-800-618-8545 or email [e-mail] to Explain It to Me ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now. for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. The Hulu original series Furious is coming to Disney Plus. Starring Emmy Rossum, Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating serial killer. Both walk their own paths toward justice, and as their lives start to intertwine, the line between right and wrong begins to blur. Don't miss the three-episode premiere of the Hulu original series Furious. on July 27th, only on Hulu on Disney Plus. My name is Vienna, like the song, city, or sausage.

Not Elizabeth, not Bethany, just that. I like to think that it connects me to my family, but also maybe I just embraced my weirdness. Have you ever noticed there are a lot of professional athletes named Jalen? Why so many Jailen's in an NBA? I think it's way too many Jalen's in the NBA. There's Jalen Williams, Jalen Brown, Jalen Johnson, and of course, Jalen Brunson. And over in the NFL?

Jalen Hertz, Jalen Carter, Jalen Ramsey, with the interception. Even the NHL has a Jalen. Jalen Jatfield puts Carolina one-nothing. Were all their parents just really huge fans of 90s basketball? Jalen Rose McLean. And more importantly, if you're not only, If your name is Jalen, are you just destined for athletic greatness? Probably not.

But each of our names does tell a story. My name is Cameron, and I think that it is one of the greatest gifts that my parents ever gave me. My name is Breed. My name is Punjabi for Beloved, and it has served as a constant reminder of the importance of love and connection. My name is based on, like, the Brooke Trout. because my family is really into fishing. So I'm named Brooke, B-R-O-O-K with no E. His mom, when she was pregnant, got visited in her dreams by the devil.

And the devil said, you cannot end up for your grandfather. And my mother wanted to name me, Michelle Dion, and the nurse said, no, we have enough, Michelle's. She's going to be a Valerie. What's in a name? Craig with a K has proven to make me unforgettable. certainly. I'm John Gwlin, Rosevia Hill, and this week on Explain It to Me from Vox, the history, the hottest trends, and all the mysterious forces that shape what we call ourselves.

Most of the time, though, our names are chosen for us, usually by our parents, and sometimes they get a little help. My name is Taylor Humphrey, and I help parents pick the perfect names for their babies. Taylor considers your family tree, your life story, your love story, but she says naming your kid should be a team effort. I think it's very important for parents to treat the process of baby naming as almost this new way of getting to know each other. It's like you really need to be tender and open-hearted about these conversations because names hold such deep, special, spiritual value in our life. And it's a way that we are world building in our own minds about who we are and what kind of

children we're going to raise. And I think it says so much about who we believe ourselves to be. Okay. It is currently summer 2026. What are the hottest baby names right now? Well, I will say that the highest rising name of last year was a name. I had never really heard it before. It's Ilani. A-I-L-A-N-Y. I-L-A-N-Y. It swept the popularity charts.

It rose a lot. And it's falling into a category that I call kind of the long eye names. So names like Ila, Ivy, I-L-L-A-Lani, Maya, Kaya. So anything that has that eye sound in it. And parents are really, really gravitating towards these names with the long vowel sounds. I would love to know what you think of my list of baby names. Granted, I have no kids.

Children are amazing, but, you know, just not at that stage of life at the moment. I hear you. I hear you. Okay, the first one is actually my middle name. And it is Rosavia. Oh, my gosh. That is so romantic. It fits into this category of these like V names.

So we've got Avery, Ava, Everly, Vivian. I think that that is a great name. Nobody has used this name, or less than five people, have used this name in the United States in 2025. Okay, good, a little original. That brings me to baby name number two. And it's Johnny, but an I.E. for a girl. Johnny is actually, in my opinion, very underutilized for girls. And I think it is such a great way to

honor a, you know, grandpa Jonathan, John, Jack. Like, it is so cute. And it does really follow one huge trend that I'm seeing right now, which I would call kind of grandpa nicknames for little girls. So that would be Names like Scotty and Frankie, Charlie, Andy, Johnny, Marty. I think that they have this, like, quaint little vintage charm to them, but they're still so sassy and I just love them. Okay. And then my third and final name is actually one that I stole from my parents. I'm an only child, but they were like, oh, if you ever had a sister, we would have named

her Janaya. And I'm like, well, I'll borrow that. Janaya is so cute too. Again, with these I names. Let's use Janaya as an example where one parent loves these vowel-heavy, romantic, very unique names. And the other parent is like, well, we want something kind of like modern and easy and cool, spunky, whatever. You could go with a name like Jones or Josiah. And you could use that for a little girl, which I think would be kind of cool. Oh. That might be a way that, you know, you kind of combine these two preferences and find something

that feels really aligned for you and your family where it's like you're finding creative ways to honor the people that you love or to honor the names that you've just loved forever. What tips do you have for parents who are like, I do not know what I'm about to name this child, who are having a hard time? I think a lot of parents work themselves into a tizzy, and then they get there and they've delivered their baby and the nurses keep coming in saying, like, we have to sign the birth certificate. We've got to submit this. You know, they need their social security card. Like, we got to get the ball rolling. And there's just so much pressure. If you're the parent who has not chosen a baby name and you're at the hospital and you're really worried about this, I actually think that your baby could. greatly help you to choose that name to make that final choice on a name. I had the most beautiful, oh my gosh, just one of the most really beautiful, life-changing consultations with a client. She had been considering a name, her entire pregnancy.

The father liked it, but wasn't totally on board. And the baby is born, and we jump on a face time call and I asked the mom just we're going to go through the list right and we're going to say the full name as you want it to be we're going to go one by one and we're just going to say it quietly calmly we're going to say it a couple of times and we're just going to watch your baby's face and see how they react to the sound of these names that you're saying the baby's asleep so you can kind of see like his lip curl or kind of like he's like making these like little cute micro expressions they're so cute. He kind of passes some gas. Like he seems a little fussy at times,

but he's like mostly just sleeping as we're doing this exercise. And of course, we're saving the best for laughs. We're saving that name that mom, the whole pregnancy was like, I just really want this full name. And we get to the name and she's saying it. And he opens his eyes and smiles, I swear to God. He's like, to this day, it was the most beautiful experience.

probably of like my time as a baby name consultant. It was like, oh, this is, we're just in the presence of truth. Like the truth of this baby is that this baby's name should be this. And I think like that is what I would hope every parent who really is ruminating about a name comes to, which is like, what is the truth of who this baby is? You know, what is the name that best aligns with the spirit of this child that's coming in? Parents take so much care in naming their children. So why does it feel like there are a million babies named Liam right now?

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in just a few minutes. That's tachiatry.com slash explain it to get matched in minutes. Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000. Always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance for dogs and cats, according to consumer advocate.org.

You get paid back up to 90% of vet bills at any vet in the U.S. in Canada, with claims paid back in as a little as two days. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. I'm Kiki. I've had that name my entire life, okay? And then I was a middle school girl, and then that Drake song came out. Now, whenever I introduce myself to anyone

who is like between the ages of like, let's call it like 12 and like 30 now, every single one of them goes. And I'm like, yeah, that's the song. Yeah, just like the song. I'm JQ, back with Moore explain it to me. And today we're asking, where do our names come from, and what do they tell the world about who we are? My full name is Cleveland Kent Evans.

He's named after both his grandfathers. His friends call him Cleve. In American culture, individualism is so strong. What I hear most often from parents is we want to find a name which is different but not. too different. We want a name that will be unique, quote unquote, but that everybody will like, you know, so they won't get teased about it. Cleave is the former president of the American Name Society, and he writes a column for the Omaha World Herald about what names are popular and why. And so ironically, I think the people who give their kids the most popular names

are probably more different than average from the general population than other people. because they don't care that they're living against the popular days. That is so funny. Okay, so we have this, you know, very American individualized kind of outlook when it comes to names. I would love to get into how other social factors shape how we name people. How does race shape our names? Oh, well, of course, the African-American community has had a very different experience with naming. since the 1960s. If you go back before the 1960s, unfortunately, prejudiced, racist people,

one of the things they used to say about black people was they have funny names, quote, unquote. Statistically, before 1960, that wasn't really true or it was just like barely true. It was like black people had names that were like one or two percent more unusual than white people. It was, it was very small. And what happened in the 60s was as part of black power, as, sometimes happens with other things with minorities that are persecuted, they sort of turned what had been a negative into a positive. And many people, especially in large cities in the U.S., many black people said, we are the people who give our children unique names to show how much we love them, to show how valued they are. And that's when you got the tradition of

creating new names and where instead of the individual names necessarily being what went through fashions, it was the syllables they were made out of. And so at the beginning, like in the 60s and 70s for girls, the most common prefix was law. And so you had, you know, Lacetia, Latasha, Latoya, you know. Oh, yeah. And then in around the, in the 90s, the most popular prefix was. Shah, and so you had Shanish, Chiquita, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm thinking back to elementary school, lots of SHA names now that I think about it. How does class show up in the way we pick names? People who are highly educated want new names for the kids, but for them, they have to find something that has a history in the culture. So they're the ones to go back and revive the old names for while blue-collar people. people are more interested in stuff which is new, which is even, you know, outside the African American community, things which are newly invented or things which have not been girls or children's

names until recently, they're more attracted to. So it's like in your age group is Brittany, you know. Yeah. Oh my gosh. So many Britannies. Yes. Nothing is 100%, you know, you're going to be able to find some Ph.D. or MD somewhere who named their daughter Brittany, you know, but blue-collar people would have been more attracted to that because it was just a province in France, you know. How do names become popular? Things do not go from zero to top ten overnight. But what happens is you have often what I call the Hollywood feedback loop. People will start bringing back names and especially with some of these revival names, you know, the screenwriters in Hollywood

tend to be college-educated people, and so they very often are going to give their characters names which are too young for them because they name their characters like they would name a kid, you know. And so what happens is that the screenwriters named characters that presents the name to the whole population, and then all of a sudden it shoots up. An example of something sort of changing social class,

that way was Tristan, where Tristan sort of first came up among more educated people, and there was a character on the original All Creatures Great and Small. Tristan! Did they? Tristan! Oh! Tristan! It's grand to see you.

And there were boys being named Tristan. And then you have the movie Legends of the Fall with Brad Pitt playing the character, Tristan. You, Tristan. You will marry her. All of a sudden, the name shoots up. I mean, it had been rising slowly, you know, as in boy's name. Blue-collar people sort of naming their sons Tristan because of that movie. So it was not just the educated people who were naming their sense Tristan anymore.

Very suddenly, you know, at that point. One of the hugest increases just because of television was a few years ago, there was a, about 2008, I think, there was a program on one of the cable TV networks called 16 and pregnant. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, I know the ancient texts, yes. Yes.

One of the first babies born on that show was a boy named Bentley. You know what you're going to? Bentley. Cadence. I don't know, right. I found it in a baby book. I know Bentley. I've been keeping up with Macy and Bentley, yes.

But the name Bentley for baby boys was like one of the fastest growing boys names ever. Wow. It went from almost nothing to within about three years being like 75th, most common name for boys in the U.S. Bentley, I'm not, this is not a joke. What advice do you have for people out there who are like, oh my gosh, like, I got to name this kid, what am I going to do?

Like, how should people be approaching it? How should they be thinking about it? First of all, they shouldn't worry about it too much. I got a communication from a woman who had an uncle who she really loved and really admired whose name was Floyd. Yeah. And so she said, can I really name my son Floyd? Won't he be teased too much? And what I told her, look, you really love this uncle.

What you do is you name your son Floyd, but then from the very beginning you tell him why you named him that and why his great uncle Floyd was a marvelous person. and why you loved him so much and make him proud of it, you know, to protect him from the teasing. Just like there is no such thing as either the perfect parent or the perfect child, there's no such thing as the perfect name, you know. There are lots of different names that would work equally well for your child, and you shouldn't think that you have ruined their life by giving them the wrong name, quote, unquote, you know.

I guess I tell most people, you know, think of it like, you know, how are you going to give a message to the child as to what name you want to give them? What is the message that your name gives you? That's next. I'm stand-up comedian. John Marco Seresi. And I'm actor-piness model, Russell Daniels. The downside is our podcast where we bring on guests to talk about how miserable their lives are.

Because let's face it, things are not getting better. Every episode we talk about what's wrong with our lives, our guest lives, the world. But in a fun way. Bottom line is, you're going to walk away feeling better about your life. We've had so many cool guests, Caleb here on. Busy Phillips. Stavros Halkias. Laverne Cox.

Hassan Piker. Alana Glazer. I promise you're going to have a good time. Now on the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is the downside. It all started with Call Me Maybe. Over 10 years ago, we created Switched on Pop to Listen Closer, uncovering the songcraft behind even the glossiest of pop hits. Since then, we've released almost 500 episodes.

We've defined the sounds of our modern soundtrack and interviewed hundreds of musicians and music insiders, including the singer of Call Me Maybe herself, Carly Ray Jepson. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan and I'm songwriter Charlie Harding and on July 14th Switched on Pop is embarking on a new chapter. We're stepping out from behind our microphones and in front of the camera to stream our podcast on Netflix. Now you'll still be able to listen to the show anywhere you get podcasts but now you'll be able to watch us each week breaking down the sounds of the moment digging into musical minutiae with your favorite artists and offering questionable dad

jokes, as always. We're kicking off our Netflix debut with a four-part series on the art of the song, with help from artists, producers, and songwriters like Aaron Dessner, Audrey Hobart, Trevor Horn, Cypress Hill, and Taylor Parks. Stream switched on pop on Netflix and anywhere you get podcasts every Tuesday, starting on July 14th. We're back. I'm JQ or John Gulen. My name is Regan. My parents never outright told me I was named after the president. However, they are conservative and were big fans of the Reagan administration. I am grateful to have a gender-neutral name.

I do believe that it's strong and beautiful. However, as I grew more awake to the things the Reagan administration had done, it completely changed who I was and how I viewed my name. I started going by Ray. It caused quite a bit of friction between me and my parents. maybe one day I'll go about my full name again. However, this is who I am. We asked you for the stories behind your names and y'all delivered.

Some of you, like Ray, have chosen new names. Others have had to wrestle with what to do with the ones they were born with. Hi, so my name is Susan, and I grew up absolutely hating my name, mostly because we watched a lot of Wheel of Fortune as children, And then the people named Susan growing up that were on the Wheel of Fortune were always these older, housewise, a little bit frumpier. And so that's what I associated with the name Susan. Well, fast forward to my mid-20s. And my grandmother tells me that my mother's birth name was actually Susan.

She was adopted. And my grandmother adopted her, she renamed her. And now the name Susan holds a very different meaning. and value in my heart. My name is Falashidae. That is a Yurban name from Nigeria. I am named after my dad's late sister who died in childhood from sickle cell disease. But either way, I've always really loved my name.

I do have the trouble of getting people to pronounce my name correctly. And sometimes there's a little bit of friction when people try and give me. a nickname off the bat, which I don't appreciate. Other people have told me that they've met other Falashidae and I've met in Aluashidae, but I'm the only Felasidae that I know personally, and I couldn't imagine being any other name. I've actually encountered only one other John Gwlin in my entire life, and I wanted to know why my name is so rare. So I called up the two people who know best. I'm Deborah Hill. I'm your mother. Yes, you are my mom.

I am John Dehill, Jocelyn's father. And one thing you need to know before you hear the story is that there aren't a lot of women on my dad's side of the family. When you were born, I did ask the doctor a question. He said, it's a girl. And I said, Doc, are you sure? And he said, I've delivered enough of them to know the different. between a boy and a girl. And so mom was on the gurney.

The doctors handed you to me, and it was like, I have not thought about any girl's name. But mom had some girls' names in mind. The only name that I had was Elizabeth Ann, because that was Elizabeth Ann after both my grandmothers. And your father didn't like that name. And my mother, she said there are too many Elizabeth in the family. So she said, no, you're going to have to come up with something different.

I wanted my name in there. I was going to get John in there some kind of way. All I knew was I did not want a Janetta, a Johnny Mae, any of those. And as I looked at things a little bit further, I found out there was a Johnetta. And the Johnquil comes out, you know, in the springtime. And it's abundant when it does come out. It's kind of dainty when you look at it. And so that led to that first part of your name.

Mama, what did you think of that? I liked when your father said Janquil and my sister's name is Carolyn. And I said, I have to have part of her name in there. And so he picked your first name, and I picked your middle name. Yeah, tell the story of my middle name. My father had two sisters, Rose and Octavia, and I just combined them, Rosavia. So you became Johnqueline Rosavia Hill. Not JQ, but JQ, but JQaeda.

I just refused to call you JQ. And it seems like all the younger people call you that other name. Jake, Jake, Jake. In my family, tradition had it that names were from those who lived before us and they were passed down. Part of that was just a joy to realize that the two families come together in your name. And then it's the recognition that you are your own person as well. And you really don't have to live up to anyone else. You're free to choose, you know, what you do and everything.

That's really sweet. I'm getting kind of like emotional. I'm not going to lie to you. When I have a kid someday, do you have hopes for what I'll name them? No, that'll have to be your decision. No, I believe that too. Okay, Daddy, you'll never believe this. But, like, on my short list of names that I would think of for kids,

Johnny is on the list for a girl. Oh, okay. Well, if that's your choice. I know that's right. If that's your choice. He said, if you like it, I love it. He didn't say that. He said, that's your choice.

You didn't join the lie. That's it for this week. Thank you to each of you who called an email to tell us your story. Rachel, Lanham, Tim, Bonnie, Olympia, Olivia, there are too many of you to name. And I gotta say, all those names are pretty great. Now, we want your help with an upcoming show about paraminopause and how our bodies are constantly changing. We want to know, what are the ways you've noticed hormones impacting your health,

your mood, your relationships, and what questions do you have? give us a call at 1-800-618-8-8-55 or send an email to AskVox at Vox.com. And before we go, I got a shout out two other names I love, Noam Hassanfeld and Bird Pinkerton. They host the podcast Unexplainable and just launched a version on Netflix. Every episode features a scientific mystery or an unanswered question. Head over to Netflix and give it a watch. This episode was produced by Danielle Hewitt. It was edited by Jenny Lawton, fact-checked by Sarah Shweppy, engineered by David Tadshaw.

Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy, and I'm your host, John Glyn Hill. And you can still totally call me, JQ. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Bye!