Why is it that some baby names dominate the charts every single year? This week, the U.S. Social Security Administration of the most-popular 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 ? 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 f.
