Trend volatility is low for real roots (they do not move). Volatility is high for the marketplace of glosses.
AI will generate even more confident one-liners. Demand a source anyway.
Cycles
- Virtue-word revivals — English names whose gloss is the name (Hope, Grace) come and go in dated files.
- Theophoric fashion — Religious meanings return in some decades.
- Invented-language glosses — Fiction names get after-the-fact meanings from fans.
- Nationalist etymologies — Roots get conscripted into origin politics.
- App-luck cycles — Stroke and star products rebrand every few years.
Signals
- Citation on a meaning page — The quality signal.
- Scholarly reprints of Hanks-type works — Healthy.
- DNA ads using surname roots — A caution signal.
- KOSTAT/SSA movement — Fashion signal, not a meaning signal.
Outlook
- More machine glosses — Fluent and often wrong.
- Stable scholarly methods — Comparative linguistics will still be slow and hedged.
- Continued kin-meaning practice — Hanja and generation names will remain cultural systems to describe, not to mystify.
The outlook is more text, not more truth, unless readers keep asking “according to whom?”