Names of the year 2025
An AI name, two -ANI names, a KitKat, and some poor naming choices.
Earlier this week I posted my words of the year for 2025, a list led by chaos. Time now for a shorter list of names of the year (NotY).
Short, but not that short. Click on the headline to read the entire post in your browser, or switch to the Substack app.
On her blog, Namerology, Laura Wattenberg, aka Baby Name Wizard, has revealed an excellent — and surprising — Name of the Year: Elara.
Never heard of it? You will:
Elara is an extremely rare name in the human world. In the world of generative AI, though—the systems designed to generate their own new content like text, images, and videos—the name is a smash hit. Elaras abound in the output of every generative AI system, from all-purpose powerhouses like ChatGPT and Gemini to niche character generators. They populate every writing genre from math word problems to novels. The name has become an embodiment of the low-effort machine-generated content known as “AI slop.”
Be sure to read the whole post for the rest of Laura’s thorough analysis.
It’s hard to top that selection, so I’ll merely present three additional noteworthy names for your consideration. Read to the end for some dishonorable mentions and links to previous NotYs.
I call the first two names . . .
The -ANIs
Mamdani and Ohtani: what a pair!
Zohran Kwame Mamdani
New York’s next mayor is 34 years old; he was born in Uganda to Indian expatriate parents. His full name tells the story of his heritage, as Al Jazeera explained shortly after he won the election:
His surname, Mamdani, is a common Gujarati name for Khoja Muslims, a sect of Islam.
Etymologically, Mamdani roughly translates to “Mohammadan”, a name for followers of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad.
His first name, Zohran, has both Arabic and Persian origins and carries several meanings, including “light”, “radiance”, and “blossom”.
His middle name, Kwame, is a traditional name of the Akan people, from the ethnic Kwa group who live primarily in Ghana as well as in parts of the Ivory Coast and Togo in West Africa.
In his campaign, Mamdani emphasized his first name in messaging and made the initial Z his brand: When he led a citywide scavenger hunt, for example, it became a “Zcavenger hunt.” But his middle name sent a message, too. As Quiara Vasquez observed in a comment on Namerology’s call for nominations:
I can’t think of another politician who’s really leaned into their middle name over the course of their career like this. The surface level read is that an “exotic” middle name like that is meant to play up his African “heritage” — he’s of Indian (Gujarati) descent, but he was born in Uganda. His academic dad named him after Kwame Nkrumah. (Who is, yes, Ghanaian, not Ugandan — I’m guessing this was a pan-African thing.) There’s obviously a cynical motivation for him to say “I’m an African-American named Kwame!” (e.g., passing yourself off as black on your college apps), but I also wonder whether this was a defense mechanism for a Muslim who came of age in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Kwame peaks in the SSA data in 1990, the same year Zohran was born[.]
Barack Hussein Obama walked (and won) so that Zohran Kwame Mamdani could run (and win)? Could be.
Shohei Ohtani
I’m repeating this selection from 2024 because the Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher/slugger outdid himself this season, hitting three home runs and pitching six shutout innings with 10 strikeouts in Game 4 of the World Series — one day after he hit two home runs in Game 3. (Wikipedia: “No player had struck out even five batters where they hit three home runs in any MLB [Major League Baseball] game. No player had hit more than two home runs in a career in games they pitched before in MLB history.”)
But my interest in Ohtani extends beyond his formdiable achievements. As I wrote in my nominating statement on Namerology:
His is perhaps the first Japanese name to dominate American baseball (it certainly dominated the 2025 World Series). Bonus: the “Sho” element of his name means “to soar.” And he has a great nickname: “Shotime.”
Mamdani and Ohtani: Diversity ain’t dead in these United States.
And then there was . . .
KitKat
Under most circumstances the death of a furry shop mascot in city traffic would be a private tragedy. But the sudden death on October 27 of 9-year-old KitKat, “a feline fixture at Randa’s Market” in San Francisco’s Mission District, became global news because of the perp: a Waymo robotaxi — or, as the New York Times print edition of November 16 put it, “a driver who has no heart.”
Naturally, the story was covered extensively by Bay Area news outlets. But it didn’t stop there. The tale of KitKat versus automaton was, well, catnip for The Guardian, the Washington Post, TechCrunch, Rolling Stone, the Times of India, and People. The press’s favorite adjective was “beloved.” (Hint: It wasn’t modifying “Waymo.”) The San Francisco Chronicle published “an exclusive interview with KitKat from the Great Beyond” (“Admit it. You didn’t care about me until I lost my ninth life”). The Los Angeles Times revealed poignant biographical details (“He wasn’t a surly or suspicious cat — he could be seen playing with someone’s dangling hoodie drawstrings; snoozing in front of shelves with liquor bottles; curling up inside a cardboard box marked with his name; greeting the neighborhood dogs; even dressing up as Santa Claus”). Bay Area Current minced no words: “Fuck Waymo. Long Live KitKat.” PC Mag glumly predicted that “San Francisco can’t stop Waymo from killing your cat.” And Wikipedia added KitKat (cat) to its Kit Kat disambiguation page.
What about those other Kit Kats or KitKats? There’s the chocolate-confection brand, introduced in the U.K. in September 1935 as the descendant of a 1920s brand spelled Kit Cat. In the U.S. it’s a division of Hershey. “Kit Kat” and “KitKat” had been used in reference to foodstuffs since the 18th century, when “when mutton pies known as Kit Kats were served at meetings of the political Kit-Cat Club in London owned by pastry chef Christopher Cat” (Wikipedia).1 The fictional Kit Kat Klub is a setting in the play and movie Cabaret; a real KitKatKlub opened in Berlin in 1994. New York’s Stephen Sondheim Theatre, on West 43rd Street, which has had almost as many lives as a cat, in 1998 served as a cabaret called Kit Kat Club.
Dishonorable mentions
The current U.S. president has spent the first year of his return engagement pointlessly and maliciously renaming things, mostly at U.S. taxpayer expense.
“Gulf of America”: What to do on Day One of your new job? Change the name of the Gulf of Mexico (golfo de México), apparently. “Issued on the day of his inauguration (January 20, 2025), the executive order only requires the U.S. executive branch to use this nomenclature, although major online map platforms and some U.S.-based media outlets have voluntarily made the change. “Gulf of Mexico” has been the mapmaking convention since 1550. “As of February 2025, polling shows the majority of Americans oppose renaming the Gulf of Mexico.” (Wikipedia, “Gulf of Mexico naming controversy.”)
“Department of War”: True, it was the Department of Defense’s original name, beginning in 1794. But it’s been the DoD since 1949, and the switch — made by executive order in September — would seem to lie at counter-purposes to the president’s insistence that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. I probably don’t need to remind you that a name change like this one is expensive: signage, stationery, websites, etc. Pay those taxes!
“Fort [name of traitor]”: In June, the U.S. Army announced it would be re-renaming seven bases, restoring the names of “white Southerners who fought to preserve slavery,” including Robert E. Lee. (Source of quotes in this paragraph: the Equal Justice Initiative.) The bases had been given worthier names in 2023 after “hundreds of hours of research, community engagement, and internal deliberations.” All down the gilded toilet now. To get around a previously enacted ban on honoring insurrectionists, “the Army identified service members with the same last names as the secessionists—a tactic first used to revert the name of the nation’s largest military base from Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg earlier this year.”
“Trump-Kennedy Center”: He replaced the whole board of the once-esteemed center with a bunch of toadies who on December 18 voted to insert the name of a philistine ahead of the president who brought American Ballet Theater and cellist Pablo Casals to the (now partially demolished) White House. The first public event at the Kennedy Center, on September 8, 1971, was the world premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass; the accompanying dance performance was choreographed by Alvin Ailey.
What’s next? The Bulwark throws up its collective hands: “Screw it. Let’s rename the moon.”
For guidelines on when and when not to rename, please refer to a story I wrote for Medium in 2022, “When to Change a Name — and When Not to.” Notably: “Don’t consider a name change only because you’ve had an upper-management change.”
Last year’s NotYs:
The 2023 NotYs:
Fun fact I learned this year: A kit-kat (or kit-cat) portrait is less than half-length, but includes the hands. “The name originates from a famous series of portraits which were commissioned from Godfrey Kneller for members of the Kit-Cat Club [sic], a Whig dining club, to be hung in their meeting place at Barn Elms” (Wikipedia).
I appreciate the shout-out! :'D And yes, (other) Nancy was really cooking this year with Elara Voss. And I'm not just saying this because it's almost exactly my name with the first and last syllables removed!
Here is my most miserly killjoy opinion: I hate, hate, *hate* bodega cats. Hate them. Hate that "I have my cat eat the rats that come into my store" is framed as a cute bit of thrift rather than a grotesque health violation. Hate that they sit at the intersection of the internet's annoying cat fetish (I like cats, but c'mon) and a particular type of New Yorker's fixation on bodegas (wow, it's like, Spanish... so EXOTIC!). But more than anything, I hate that there would be zero fawning obituaries if the Waymo had run over the bodega's human owner.
Imagine my surprise to read Nancy Friedman citing sports statistics :)
re: renaming to less controversial, but identical, names — you probably know the history of the redesignation of King County (where Seattle is) from some 19th-century racist to honoring MLK (?)