Linguist Reveals the Secret Behind Trending US Baby Names

Why is it that some baby names dominate the charts every single year?

This week, the U.S. Social Security Administration released its ranking of the most-popular baby names in the United States in 2023. And, for the fifth year in a row, Liam and Olivia have secured the top spots, while Noah and Emma have held onto second place. But what is it about these names that parents just can’t get enough of?

Linguist Adam Cooper, a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, says that it may be down to the way these names roll off our tongues. Specifically, these popular names tend to avoid “hard stops.”

“It’s really interesting to see how prominent the patterns were,” Cooper said in a statement. “Names like Patrick, Peter or Greg—these are names that would be more ‘stopful,’ so to speak. These stop sounds are not here in the list, really […] there’s more of a flow to the sounds and sound combinations making up these popular names.”

However, avoidance of “hard stops” is not the only thing many of these popular names have in common. Cooper highlighted a field of linguistic study called phonaesthetics, which examines the perceptions of beauty and elegance in the sounds of certain words in different languages.

“Connecting what’s been studied about English phonaesthetics, pretty much all the names [on the list] would be ‘phonaesthetically pleasing,'” Cooper said.

Of course, sound is not the only thing parents consider when choosing their child’s name. Some go with family names, while others look to influential figures and celebrities, or characters from their favorite TV shows. For example, the Social Security Administration found that Kaeli and Eiden—the names of two popular TikTok stars—had seen a significant uptick in the last year.

Native language may also play a role. For example, Cooper says that the name Mateo— which has appeared as a top 10 name for the first time this year—may be due to America’s increasing Hispanic population.

“Mateo could also be said to be more phonoaesthetically pleasing because it has multiple syllables and the shift in vowels, whereas Matthew is just two syllables,” Cooper said. “It’s not only just an acknowledgment of the language that has been the source of this name and its status within United States society and culture, but also a connection to the sound patterns themselves that may be perceived to be somewhat more rhythmic.”

As for baby girls, most of the names on the list end with an A, which Cooper says can be traced back to Latin declensions. “I think the graphical system of Latin has in a way influenced what we perceive to be more ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ name types,” he said.

“There isn’t anything about the final vowel inherently that makes it more feminine or not, but it’s just the associations and how it happened to have been used in this earlier grammatical system and how that language has developed into the various Romance languages.”

To see if your name made the list, here is the top 10 list for baby names for boys in 2023:

1. Liam
2. Noah
3. Oliver
4. James
5. Elijah
6. Mateo
7. Theodore
8. Henry
9. Lucas
10. William

And for girls:

1. Olivia
2. Emma
3. Charlotte
4. Amelia
5. Sophia
6. Mia
7. Isabella
8. Ava
9. Evelyn
10. Luna