What's in a name?

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1:27Jonquilyn Hill:Have you ever noticed there are a lot of professional athletes named Jalen? Why so many Jalens in the NBA? I think it's way too many Jalens in the NBA. There's Jalen Williams, Jalen Brown, Jalen Johnson, and of course, Jalen Brunson. And over in the NFL? Jalen Hurts! Jalen Carter! Jalen Ramsey! With the interception! Even the NHL has a Jalen. Jalen Chatfield puts Carolina 1-0. Were all their parents just really huge fans of 90s basketball? Jalen Rose McQueen. And more importantly, if your name is Jalen, are you just destined for athletic greatness? Probably not. But each of our names does tell a story.

2:15My name is Cameron, and I think that it is one of the greatest gifts that my parents ever gave me. My name is Bree. 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 my name is 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 get named after your grandfather. And my mother wanted to name me Michelle Dion. And the nurse said, no, we have enough Michelle. She's going to be a Valerie.

3:00What's in a name? Craig with a K has proven to make me unforgettable, certainly.

3:05Jonquilyn Hill:I'm John Quillen Rosavia 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.

3:52It's like you really need to be tender and open-hearted about these conversations because names hold such deep, special, spiritual value in our lives. 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.

4:24Jonquilyn Hill: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 Ailani. A-I-L-A-N-Y. Ailani. It swept the popularity charts. It rose a lot. And it's falling into a category that I call kind of the long I names. So names like Aila, Ivy, Ailani, Maya, Kaya. So anything that has that I 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 like list of baby names. Granted, I have no kids.

5:19Jonquilyn Hill: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 IE 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.

6:18Like, 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.

6:46Jonquilyn Hill: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 Janiya. Janiyah. And I'm like, well, I'll borrow that. Janiyah is so cute too. Again, with these I names. Let's use Janiyah 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.

7:32That 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.

7:51Jonquilyn Hill: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. They need their social security card. 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.

8:35I 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 facetime call and i asked the mom just we're gonna go through the list right and we're gonna say the full name as you want it to be we're gonna go one by one and we're just gonna say it quietly calmly we're gonna 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.

9:18The 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 last. for 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 oh my god 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.

10:08And 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?

10:33Jonquilyn Hill:Parents take so much care in naming their children So why does it feel like there are a million babies named Liam right now? That's next

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12:52I'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.

13:21Jonquilyn Hill:I'm J.Q. back with more 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. You know, what I hear most often from parents is we want to find a name which is different, but not too different. You know, 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. Cleve 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.

14:07And 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 giving the kids the popular names.

14:24Jonquilyn Hill: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 was just like barely true. was like black people had names that were like one or two percent more unusual than white people.

15:11It 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 la.

16:05And so you had, you know, La Keisha, La Tasha, La Toya, you know.

16:08Jonquilyn Hill:Oh, yeah. Et cetera. And then in around the in the 90s, the most popular prefix was sha. And so you had Shanish, Shaquita, 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 their kids, but for them, they have to find something that has a history in the culture. So they're the ones that go back and revive the old names. names first, while blue-collar 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.

17:04So it's like in your age group is Brittany, you know? Yeah. Oh my gosh.

17:09Jonquilyn Hill:So many Britneys. Yes. Nothing is a 100%, you know, you're going to be able to find some PhD 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 10 overnight. But what happens is you have often what I call the Hollywood feedback loop.

17:41People 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, 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.

18:22And there was a character on the original All Creatures Great and Small. Tristan! Did we? Tristan! Tris, 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. Damn 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 started naming their sons Tristan because of that movie, so it was not just the educated people who were naming their sons Tristan anymore very suddenly, you know, at that point.

19:06One 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.

19:20Jonquilyn Hill:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, I know the ancient texts. Yes. One of the first babies born on that show was a boy named Bentley. Do you know who I am? Bentley. Cadence. I don't know where 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, this is not a joke. What advice do you have for people out there who are like, oh my gosh, I got to name this kid. What am I going to do?

20:08Jonquilyn Hill: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. 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.

20:53just 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 it uh like you How are you going to give a message to the child as to what name you want to give them?

21:27Jonquilyn Hill:What is the message that your name gives you? That's next.

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