A few weeks ago, I met somebody who named their newborn daughter Lennon. That’s odd, I thought to myself. Given that the name Lennon is derived from the surname of John Lennon, I assumed it would generally be used for newborn boys. I decided to download some data to find out. Lennon, it seems, used to be more popular among newborn boys. Now, it’s mostly used for newborn girls. But in order to figure this out, I had to download 150 years of naming data from the Social Security Administration. I dove into that data to see what else I could learn about how pop culture influences names.

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