The Names Everyone Has an Opinion About

Nov 6, 2026 Abigail Adams, Editorial writer

If you want to know which baby names America has feelings about, don't look at the birth chart. Look at our vote counts.

Since 2014, every name page on this site has let visitors hand out 1 to 5 stars. 161,918 votes later, the most-voted names in the database are not the famous ones. They are these:

Kinsley (262 votes), Harlyn (259), Oaklyn (242), Henley (210), Brixton (172), Taelyn (163), Onyx (154), Avaya (152), Navy (133), Vayda (131).

Olivia, the most popular name in the country, has 100 votes. She doesn't make the top ten.

The opinionated names are brand new

Almost every name on that list is a modern invention. Of the 100 most-voted names, 65 have never ranked in the Social Security top 500 in any year — and 44 have never cracked the top 1,000 at all. Most of them didn't exist, as given names, a generation ago:

Oaklyn first appears in the birth records in 2011. In 2014 she was given to 8 babies in the whole country, ranking #4,238. She now holds 242 votes.
Harlyn doesn't appear in the 2014 birth chart at all — fewer than five babies, if any. She finished with the second-most votes on the site.
Taelyn was given to 28 babies in 2025. She has 163 votes — nearly six voters for every baby.

And the jury skews one way: 14 of the 20 most-voted names are primarily girls' names. The great naming experiments of our era are happening on the girls' side, and so is the arguing.

Why invented names collect the votes

Think about what a vote is. Nobody searches for James to check whether James is a good name — that question was settled centuries ago. You rate a name when you're considering it, or defending it. A vote is a shortlist behavior.

Modern coinages are exactly the names that need a focus group. They're the ones a partner calls "made up," a grandparent can't spell, and a parent falls for anyway. So their pages attract the people with something at stake: the fans come to award five stars, the skeptics come to award two, and the name climbs the vote chart on pure contested energy. The classics, meanwhile, are too settled to fight about. John has 37 votes. John.

Notice, too, that the crowd mostly comes to praise. The average vote across the whole database is 4.52 out of 5, and even the lowest-rated name with 50+ votes — Taysom, at 3.42 — is well above the midpoint. This is a record of enthusiasm, not a census of taste. The database even contains one vote, three stars, cast in October 2019 for a name literally recorded as "undefined" — a glitch in the old voting script, preserved like a fossil. Somebody's opinion about nothing, kept forever.

Opinions are a long-tail business

Here's the quiet surprise: the famous pile-ups barely matter to the totals. The top 100 most-voted names hold just 9,671 of the 161,918 votes — about 6%. The rest is spread across 21,247 names, at an average of 7.6 votes each. 5,099 names have exactly one vote — one person, somewhere, who cared enough to say this one, five stars (or one star; we store the totals, not the drama).

And the era has a shape. We can date each name's first vote (not every vote — the database keeps running totals, so precision matters here): new names poured in from 2014 to 2019 — 4,313 in 2014 alone, still 2,148 in 2019 — then the stream thins to 302 in 2020, 185 in 2021, and 132 in 2022. The last name to receive its first vote did so on June 10, 2022. The widget still sits on every name page, but the great age of rating names, at least here, has gone quiet.

Our advice: If you love a modern coinage, read its vote count as the signal and its average with a smile. A big count means the name provokes real feeling in real people — that's a feature, not a warning. Your child will not be harmed by having a name strangers once argued about on the internet. She may even thank you for picking the one with a fan club.

Meet the argued-about: Kinsley, Harlyn, Oaklyn, Brixton — and their quiet opposite, John.