The list of the most popular baby names in the US and Canada have been coming out at year’s end, as reported by popular parenting sites BabyCenter and Babynames. They’re not identical lists, but there’s enough overlap in the top 10 that you can see distinct trends.
The most popular girls’ names are ultra-femme, usually ending in soft, feminine-sounding “uh” or “ee” sounds: Isabella, Olivia, Ava, Sophia, Emma, Chloe, Emily, Lily. Interestingly, boys’ names are, well, less macho-sounding in years past, and full of softer-sounding consonants: Liam, Jayden, Aiden, Noah, Ethan, Oliver, Lucas, Logan. Frankly, I think this generation sounds like they could be in the cast of “Sex and the City.” Traditional and Biblical names like Michael, Christopher, Joseph, Sarah, Mary and Deborah have declined in popularity while names rooted in pop culture have gone way up . (Caveat: I suspect the self-reporting going on at these sites—allegedly “hundreds of thousands” of parents—is mostly being done by white parents.)
I have a very traditional name that sounds both old-world English and overtly Jewish (it’s from the Hebrew Bible). It satisfied both my mother’s WASP family traditions (it’s common in her family going back to England in the 1600s) and my father’s Ashkenazi family traditions (combined with his last name, I sound super-Jewish). As a child, I was like Anne of Green Gables, who longed for a more lyrical, fairytale-sounding name—Anne wanted to be called Cordelia, and I wanted to be Anastasia. Or Isabella. Or Mariana. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate my traditional name. It’s dignified. It’s adult-sounding. People always pronounce it correctly. It’s not potentially embarrassing; I suspect MamaSharper was sensitive to the potential embarrassment factor because she narrowly escaped the name her German-American grandmother selected for her: Delweena. (Yes, SRSLY. She really dodged a bullet.)
Let’s talk about names. (They don’t have to be your own, as I know some of us prefer anonymity). Do you have favorites? Trends you love or hate? Embarrassing names? Cool names? Names you wish you’d been given, or gave yourself?
Being called Ehsan Roudiani (I’m the only one on google, so this may as well be one more hit!) has been, shall we say, character-building, with the result that I now have enough character for at least three women.
It’s pronounced just how it’s spelt, but I standardised to Es in my teens. That still gets queries (‘as in the letter S?’) but at least I can say yes to that and have done with it. I have friends who knew me all through university and didnt’ find out until facebook that my name wasn’t just S.
I love my name now, it suits me down to the ground, but it has sometimes been a trial.
names/the immigrant thing: It’s just one more difference to worry about in childhood: why is my name like this but their names are like that? Never mind the other 5 girls in my class with Spanish names.
I saw some comedian one time talk about his own immigrant-childhood name experience. He said he was the youngest of 3 brothers. He knew exactly when his parents became americanized. His older brothers are Luis and Rafael. His name is Jeff.
My first and last name are both of general Scottish origin. They’re also a matched set – same number of letters and syllables in each, with matching double letters. The whole package kind of rolls off the tongue, and I think it makes a nice byline (important, because I write for my job and freelance).
And of course, it’s hard to talk about names for women without talking about name changing. I’m engaged, and have talked with my partner about whether I should change my name upon marriage. He said it’s totally my call. I have nothing against his name, and it sounds perfectly okay with my existing names, either as a new last name or added on to the existing first and last.
But I’m just not sure I can bring myself to pull the legal name change trigger. My name just works so well, even tacking onto it seems like it would ruin the alliteration and symmetry.
So, original, symmetrical, alliterative and Scottish name it will most likely stay.
“He knew exactly when his parents became americanized. His older brothers are Luis and Rafael. His name is Jeff.”
My dad’s older brothers’ names have more traditionally Italian, though they go by more Americanized nicknames. They also speak Italian; he doesn’t.
I’m okay with my own name in that I’ve been Kathy for nearly forty years I couldn’t imagine changing it, but it’s more a name from my mom’s generation than my own (Kate or Katie is by far the popular choice).
A lot of my friends have new babies or toddlers under 2, and they are all named either Hazel or Jack, which is fine, but weird.
Not a fan of my most-popular-name-for-girls-born-that-year, no ma’am. I’ve always wanted to change it, whether to something femme-y and literary like “Ophelia” or something gender neutral, like “Charlie.” I don’t think there’s any name that fits me perfectly, though, even the one I’ve had for my entire life. Sadface.
I have a ridiculously unusual first name, and like Es I’m the only hit on Google. I have an affinity for unusual names as a result. I liked being the only kid with my name growing up. I got teased about it sometimes, but I think that had less to do with my name and more to do with the fact that it lent itself to some clever mispronunciations.
Anyway, according to those lists, my son’s name has made it’s way into the top 50, and to be honest, it kind of bums me out. And it makes me want to launch into an explanation that the reason we chose his name was somehow better than the reasons other parents might have had for choosing the name, and we didn’t just jump on the bandwagon. Because my son’s a special snowflake.
When I was a kid I desperately wanted to be called Katia. It was so exotic sounding…or Sam (short for Samantha) because I thought it would have been kick-ass to have a ‘boy’ name.
Re: Americanization…when my great-grandfather came through Ellis Island he changed his name from Isaak to Irving and then named his two sons Paul and Robert. It was a very deliberate act of assimilationism. My grandmother and her brother also changed their Jewish names to English ones. But the next two generations wound up with very traditional Jewish names, which is a commentary on how well our family assimilated—if you can go back to giving your kids traditional ethnic names, you must feel pretty comfortable in your American-ness.
Oh, and as a sidebar: Irving, my great-grandfather’s name, is the quintessential old Jewish man name. If you were from the Jewish pre-WWII generation and your birth name or Hebrew name was Isaac or Israel, you got Anglicized as Irving (see also: Irving Berlin). But it’s almost disappeared now…I don’t think a single baby’s been named Irving in the past 40 years.
Well, I actually quite like this year’s top names – at least they seem to have moved away from those weirdly spelled names with random “y”s thrown in… The top names in Switzerland don’t seem to be out yet, but will probably contain some order of Luca/Noah/Jonas/David resp. Lara/Lena/Anna/Julia again, same as the last few years.
It’s taken my years to accept my own name in its full 2-in-1 glory (as a kid I was unable to pronounce it and christened myself “Evi”), but now I think it’s quite beautiful. But I don’t force people to use the whole thing, as long as they know that ‘Eva’ is a nickname.
My parents toyed with the idea of naming me Heather, which was very popular at the time. Instead, they decided to give me an old-fashioned name that they though would better suit me as an adult. I’ve often wondered if I would be somewhat different if I were Heather. (My cousin was born a few years after me and was and named Heather).
I am Anne. As in Anne Marie (insert very French-Canadian last name here) If I’d lived in Quebec, or even in the Northeast, I’d have a lot of company with my name. Instead, I was in California in the 70′s, as I was surrounded by Christinas, Jennifers, Melissas, and Michelles. My first name was old ladyish, and my full name was pretty ethnic Catholic/immigrant sounding, at least compared to most of my classmates. I don’t think I came to terms with my name until I was 10 or so.
When I was little I renamed myself Cat Rose (after two things I really really liked) and signed my schoolwork like that for a little while. Later I just wished I had a more trendy name. Once I got to college, suddenly I encountered a lot more Ann/Anne/Annas, and realized the disadvantage of having lots of dormmates with the same first name
Re Americanization of first names – it’s an interesting thing to think about. In my mom’s side of the family they Americanized names after the first kid (they were German and this was in the late 30′s) The oldest son went on to give his first two kids very german sounding names and then a more American name for the third. My mom and younger uncle have Catholic names but not German ones, and that’s what the kids got too. On my dad’s side they kept the French names through my Dad’s generation and me (I’m the oldest of my generation), but then reverted to more American names.
My mother and father have 5 girls. Every one of us either has a name that is either traditionally male or ambigious. My mother, when she was pregnant, insisted that she wanted a “feminist” name. Now, my mother is a Republican, so who knows what she actually meant. She picked Dale because she associated it with Dale Evans (cowgirl, wife of Roy Rogers).
It took me a long time to accept that I had that name. People would look at me and say “she’s a little girl with a little boy’s name!” My sisters did not fair any better (two of them have distinctly male names, two have unisex names). People were under the impression that I was doomed to become a lesbian.
The thing that I suppose irks me about modern baby naming is that there seems to be a hostility towards names that are ethnic, old world or otherwise unfamilar. My middle name, like all my sisters, is Sioux (because that’s what my mom is). She actually agonized over picking names that actually were meaningful and important (like my middle name actually means “first born daughter” cause that’s what I am). My youngest sister’s middle name is Oneida, which means “the long-awaited one” because she was the first child born after my mom’s miscarriage. People react so oddly to those names – they think that its an attempt to be “different” by picking names that are almost never heard today instead of considering the really important ethnic reasons behind the name.
As far I know, I’ve always liked my name. My mother once told me I was supposed to be Jessica but then a cousin was born and my Aunt ‘stole’ the name. So I became me. Despite the fact that there were at least 2 other girls in my grade with the same name (although amazingly all spelled differently!)
I always liked how classic my name seemed–English-y and solid; I even shared it with an author (that I didn’t care about but whatever, right?) The only time I ever hated my name was when I was having my rare adolescent fit about not being popular and being tired of “hearing my name called in the hallway at school but it’s NEVER actually for ME it’s for the other 2 girls with my name”.
Now that I am older and looking for work, I take a moment to thank my parents because when I Google myself all the women with my name in the initial results are really successful people! My brothers all have very solid, manly sort of classic names, mostly either having belonged to royalty somewhere, sometime or from the Bible. And I have to say, I much prefer them to things modern male names like ‘Jayden’ and ‘Asher’ (especially the last one, because all I can think about is that vampire from the Anita Blake books).
I am a fan of female names ending in “a” or “e” generally. I always thought they seemed terribly romantic.
My name is pronounced exactly like it’s spelled, but is so uncommon that I can count on two hands the people who have gotten it right the first time without trying to turn it into a more familiar name. I didn’t love it when I was young (I wanted dramatic and ultrafeminine – Cassandra or Anastasia), but I really appreciated it by high school. I was always the only one in school, and despite the evidence to the contrary, it’s really not hard to pronounce or spell.
Naming my own kids, it was important that they be a little uncommon. Growing up in the age of Heather, Jennifer, and Robert, I wanted my kids to have a shot at not being known by an obscure nickname or their last name. On the other hand, I feel like the common names today are less common than the common names when I was a kid. Or even ten years ago when every third girl was named a variation of Caitlyn. I only know three Aidens (or Aydens) my son’s age across all the areas I come in contact with kids, where I remember being in a class with five Jennifers at once.
My daughter’s name is Ivy, and while it’s not common, I’ve noticed a huge increase in flower names lately – I know a lot of Lilys, Hazels, and Roses. So I accidentally joined a trend there.
I’m frequently surprised by how regional names are within the US. My husbands name is the fifteenth most popular boy’s name for the year he was born. And I didn’t know a single one until I met him. I think that’s really strange. How could a name get that popular without being at least a little popular everywhere?
I thought I didn’t care too much about names, though I favor traditionally English names. Then before we had our first baby, my husband decided he really, really wanted a specific name that I just couldn’t stand. At first I thought he was joking. Alas, he wasn’t. There will be no Hieronymous in our family.
@Av0gadro: about the flower names – before we knew my son was, well, a son, my husband pushed really hard for a flower name – but we didn’t want Lilly, Rose, Hazel, ect. We bought a botany book to find a floral name that nobody else would have, and we picked Reseda (floral, uncommon, with a nod to my adopted home state of California). But I do love Ivy – it’s floral without being over the top. And it makes me think of Poison Ivy from Batman – and she was badass.
@Drahill: I love the idea of Reseda as a girl’s name. I think the French name for that plant is mignonette, which is also sometimes a girl’s name.
Now I’m thinking about unusual flower names for girls. Jacaranda would be pretty cool.
If this is a survey conducted by a couple of baby name websites, I imagine there is also a response bias toward names that aren’t the same as the ones that have been popular for a long time. In short, I suspect these surveys underestimate the prevalence of “Traditional and Biblical names like Michael, Christopher, Joseph, Sarah, Mary and Deborah.”
As for my own names, all three of them are very common, which is nice because it means I have a certain measure of internet anonymity even when I use any part of my real name (as I do on this site), but may have some recognition disadvantages when it comes to being cited in academic work.
@MontglaneChess: Asher is actually an old Hebrew name—Asher was the patriarch of one of the 12 tribes of Israel—but it wasn’t very popular until Anita Blake came along! It’s strange how trends revive those old names. Noah didn’t become popular in the non-Jewish community until Noah Wyle and “ER.” I have a cousin born in the 80s named Noah and there were zero other Noahs around him growing up. I’m not sure why Caleb is so popular now, but it’s also a Hebrew Bible name that you rarely saw until recently.
I’m constantly mystified about what is so difficult about my name, Suzanne. I can say it to people, “Hello, I’m Suzanne” and they come back with “Hello, Susan”. That’s a completely different name! I can write Suzanne on a form and something will come back to me addressed to Susan. Or Suzan. Or Suzzane. Or Suzane. Or Susanna. I can pretty much guarantee people are going to get it wrong. Even if I use the kid version of my name, Suzie, I know it will be echoed back to me as Susie. Or, surprise,… Susan. It’s not a weird name, honestly.
I have a Facebook page where I’ve indulged my fantasy of having a completely different name. Pamela.
@PhDork – Not gonna lie, I’m a little sad you know several Hazels. It’s been on my possible baby name list for years but I liked it partly for being NOT popular.
@pilker – YES!!! I am also Suzanne and people constantly pronounce it Susan, even after I SAY Suzanne. It’s like they don’t even hear the difference. I’ve never used a shortened version, even as a kid, because I love my name but people saying/spelling it wrong drives me nuts.
Growing up I wanted a name that ended in “i” because it seems so cool. Now I thank my stars I don’t have one. My dream names were Samantha (so I could be Sam) and Anastasia (after the Babysitter’s Club). Based on this post, there would be a LOT more 20/30 somethings with those names if we got to pick them ourselves.
I’m not usually bothered by trendy names, but for some reasons the names Mackenzie and Madison annoy me.
Oh yeah, and Oscar seems to becoming a popular name for little boys, at least amoung acquaintances, but when I hear it I still think of Sesame Street and Oscar the Grouch.
I have a very old-fashioned and unusual Hebrew name (I’ve only ever met two others in my life), because my mother, who also had an unusual Hebrew name, didn’t want to suffer alone (seriously–that’s what she said). Unfortunately, it has always been difficult for other Americans to pronounce and elicited a lot of hostility when I was growing up. Also, because it sounds Slavic, and my last name IS Slavic, I often have trouble convincing people of my Middle Eastern heritage or (sometimes when traveling in certain places in Europe) that I’m not a balletic ice queen or a lady who is automatically looking for sexytimes. But despite all that, I like my name, unusualness and all.
Mr. Anka and I are thinking about making small Ankas, so names are on my mind lately. I’m completely OK with solely mining his heritage for their names (I mean, who would not jump at the chance to name a kid after Genghis Khan among others, right?), but I also don’t want to inflict TOO-unusual names on kids who might suffer as a result, even though we live in the most ethnically diverse city in North America, and not in a xenophobic small town like the one I grew up in. We’re kind of partial to Quanysh (“happiness”) as a name, but at the same time I wouldn’t want to ruin the kid’s social life. Or happiness….
My name, Elizabeth, is perennially popular, but I don’t tend to run in to that many of them. I was the only one in my classes and thankfully avoided the Kelly P, Kelly B and Kelly D phenomenon that bugged my classmates. Also highly over represented: Jennifer.
I’m frequently frustrated by people who insist on a nickname but get the wrong one. I’ll use Liz but only in conversation. And woe to the people who think it’s okay to call me Lizzy.
I don’t much like my name. It’s hard to pronounce and harder to spell, and I’m not even sure where it comes from. My parents had a distant acquaintance whose daughter had my name, but beyond that I know nothing about it. As a result, I’ve always liked to think about what I would want to be named, or at least what I would want to name a daughter.
When I was a kid I liked long and feminine names – things like Anneliese and Anastasia (holla, Suzanne!). Not so much any more. And I find all the Emma-Anna-Olivia names a bit boring.
At the moment my favorite name for a girl is Judith. Sort of solid and sensible but also quite beautiful. (But if I named a daughter this, I would forbid anyone to call her Judy. *shudder*). Also: Rebecca, Jessica, Joanna, Elizabeth, Sarah.
Guilty pleasures:
I have a soft spot for Swantje and Juliane, but both of those are very difficult for people who don’t speak German to pronounce (rough transliterations: Svahn-tyeh and Yu-lee-ahn-eh).
Oh, and I was watching SVU yesterday and it occurred to me during the opening credits that Mariska is a pretty awesome name. But probably too closely associated with Mariska Hargitay for using it not to seem vaguely creepy, no?
I don’t think Mariska Hargitay is quite famous enough to make it creepy. And it is really pretty. I have a baby name book (I should probably give it away now that I’m done with kids) that divides names into categories. It has a feminine category and then a feminissa category, for girl’s names that go beyond feminine into frilly and girly. I was absolutely bound and determined to avoid anything frilly. I think Mariska falls perfectly into the clearly feminine without being at all girly category. Becky, I think anything ending in “ette” falls into too girly for me.
My son has a stone name and my daughter a plant. If we were to have another kid, we already decided it would be a bird (or possibly non-flying animal) name. I like themes that are a little subtle.
Anka: I sympathize. I wanted to represent every ethnicity my husband and I have between us for our son, but it got exhausting. I am German and Sioux, so I wanted to represent both. My husband is part of the Mizrahim – basically, a Jewish person of Arab descent. He is religiously Jewish, born in Israel but to parents of Syrian background. So, he wanted a Jewish name and Syrian name worked in there somehow. Eventually, we went for an Arab first name that could cross over to mainstream American society well and two middle names – a very German name and a Sioux one. My husband decided to drop a Jewish name because, in his words, “I already have two. One for each of us.”
Marie is only there because of an old Catholic tradition in my neck of the woods that my family hung onto until the more recent generations. My brother’s first name is technically Joseph too.
But Anelle? I have yet to find the meaning of it and the only women I have come across with that name are Acadian/Cajun. Therefore, it’s obviously an Acadian name in my mind.
But nicknames? I have a boatload of nicknames ranging from Diz, Dizzy, McPud, Dumptruck, Anal, Mickey, Chesty LaRue (that one gets a punch in the teeth), and Papoutte….that last one is a childhood one my mother uses when she wants to embarrass me.
I have only run into people with my first name 4 times in my life. It starts with M (hence my online name here), but has been mispronounced about 10 different ways by everyone from the telemarketer to the teachers in elementary school. From the time I was a kid I wanted to be named Margaret, because though it is similar in length to my name, it is easily pronounceable and easily mined for nicknames. When I was about 12 my mom told me she had wanted to name me Margaret but my dad wouldn’t agree. My dad didn’t like any of the names and they settled (finally) on the one I have.
My siblings have easy to pronounce and spell but not the most common names. Two of them have names the same as two characters from the show “Friends”. My name is difficult to pronounce AND spell for most.
Due to the trouble I’ve had with my name, I picked very common names for my boys to they can skip the constant prounouncing and spelling that happens with an unusual name. They can use their name as is, or use the common nicknames associated with them. Whatever they want. They are old enough now (11 and 14) to say that they enjoy their names, they don’t want to stick out, and they like that it is flexible (common nicknames).
@pilker and Suzanne- You know what? I get called Suzanne all the time when I first introduce myself! Folks just don’t seem to be able to hear those sounds correctly.
I work in the baby-having field so I see some interesting names come down. I have some friends who always let me know if there is a particularly spectacular name. The worst (best?) was a baby assigned male at birth whose parents let his older brother pick the middle name. Somewhere out there is a kid with the middle name Pterodactyl.
I’d also like to note that threads like this get the song 27 Jennifers stuck in my head.
“Caveat: I suspect the self-reporting going on at these sites—allegedly “hundreds of thousands” of parents—is mostly being done by white parents.”
If you want to look at graphs of baby names based on actual data (uses the social security data from the USA) then check out http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager
The interactive tool shows information about the most popular names (the top 1000, I think) over the years. It’s cool to put in a name and see when it was popular. If you enter Suzanne, mentioned earlier in the comments, you can see a huge spike in popularity. It peaked in the 1970s but by 2000 it didn’t even make the list of top 1000 names.
I was always pretty happy with my own name. No one else in my class had my name because it was a bit old fashioned (from a previous generation). But it didn’t matter to me. I liked that no one else had the name.
PS to Anka: I like the way Quanysh looks when spelled with a K.
“Kristen” is a frustrating name to have, and not just because it contributes to the whole walking-pastor’s-kid-stereotype I’ve got going on. There are about 8 different spellings and 12 other names it gets confused with. It’s hard for people to hear, and I’m soft-spoken to begin with so I always have to repeat it about five times whenever I’m introducing myself. I’ve played around with nicknames, but “Kris” never seems to stick and “Kristy” just annoys me. For a while in high school I was going by my last name (same as my handle), but that didn’t really follow me to college. I like my middle name a bit better (though it’s no less WASPy or common), but it’s also my mother’s name, so that’s out. My mother must really like my name, though, because when her sister in law had a daughter while she was pregnant with me, my mom called dibs on it.
I’ll probably give my theoretical children traditional names that are (hopefully) a little more distinctive. My future pets, on the other hand, are totally getting named after TV characters;)
@Drahill–that sounds like a nice compromise! In our case, I just decided the heck with it, since trying to reflect every facet of my own ethnic/religious background(s) in the kid’s name will make it something like ten names long.
@Ahimsa–Kuanysh with a K does look good; thanks for the suggestion! K rather than Q might just be the thing that’s needed to make it special within reason. The sound in Kazakh is usually delineated with a Q in English, but most people won’t be pronouncing it that way over here anyhow.
@Brennan–I used to wish I were named Kristen (even though–or maybe because–I was informed that little Jewish girls could never be named Kristen). Nowadays I associate the name with Kristin Lavransdatter, the heroine of a depressing but very enjoyable Norwegian feminist medieval historical fiction trilogy published in the 1920s. I love those books….
My name is old. The last time it was in the top 100 was more than 50 years ago. I’ve always hated it because, to me, it is ugly sounding and unique enough that people make a big deal out of it. Unfortunately it is coming back a bit. I feel sorry for the babies with my name.
I named my daughter Fiona. We wanted a fairly uncommon name, but not remarkably so. We chose a bunch of boy and girl names before she came, but she didn’t have brown hair, which I had expected and all of the names we had chosen were brown hair names. It took a few days to find the right name for her.
@Anka – I just read Kristin Lavransdatter this year. It is an amazing book.
Regarding Americanization – one of my grandparents was 1st generation, the other was second. The one from Eastern Europe Americanized as soon as they got here. The other side was Scandinavian and they used Scandinavian names. I’m sure the Scandinavians were much more “acceptable” than the Eastern Europeans in the 1910-1920s.
@ahimsa That website with the graphs is SO COOL! Turns out the last time my name was even vaguely popular is 1910-1930. My dad was born in 1928, so he may have grown up hearing my name somehow, hence picking it for me. How fascinating to find this out after all this time! My mom had never heard the name before, and like I said, I’ve only met someone with the name 4x in my life, and 3 of those people were elderly.
@ahimsa: I love it! Best web tool ever. Turns out my name peaked in popularity in the 70s and 80s, and then went into decline. I was born in 1975 when it appeared to be at its most popular, but honestly, I think I only knew one other girl my age with the same name when I was growing up. Strange!
@Susan – we need to swap acquaintances and get this sorted out. All the Susans on this side of the room and all the Suzannes on that side of the room!
My mother’s middle name was Mildred and she *hated* it. Her mother’s name was Mildred. She had about 10 friends named Mildred. They formed a mock “Mildred Club” for those saddled with the name.
But at least nobody ever got it wrong!
My father is an Arabic immigrant who married a Midwestern gal, but Mom was the one who insisted on my sister and I getting ethnically appropriate names. Our middle names are English and quite popular when we were born. After the first marriage and divorce, I’m back at my birth name, and Mr. Boxer never even cared about whether or not I changed it again.
Anyway, my parents took the liberty of spelling my name phonetically. People who see it written and pronounce it correctly the first try still win a prize. And this is after a famous Warrior Princess was named something that sounds quite similar. (I always knew when the substitute teacher paused they’d gotten to my name.) I honestly think that it’s because of the Z’s. Unless it’s Zack, people in the US just can’t seem to handle a name starting with Z. Or including one. And if both names have Z’s? Just make something up with a buzzy sound…at this point, I generally respond and then correct them.
And the only person I’ve met with my name is a cousin who’s about 15 years older than me. Although a variant is becoming quite common as the Mediterranean Muslim immigrant population goes up. So that’s a whole new dance. I’ve personally met one person with that name, and heard of several others.
Wow – growing up I’m glad I wasn’t the only kid who didn’t like their name very much. My first name is Amanda, but I hated it when I was younger. There was always lots of Amandas around, and in high school there were 5 Amanda’s in my english, science and maths class.
It got so bad that I started writing my name as “Manda”. I was never a ‘Mandy’ (it just doesn’t work for me, and woe betold anyone that called me that).
I’m quite fond of my middle name, especially diminutives of it, and went through a period where I would play around with my middle name as my first name, in particular “Alex”. I just loved that it was a name that you couldn’t tell what gender I was.
I got my middle name from my maternal grandmother, and there was a time when I might have also been called by her first name as well “Ivy”. I am glad that I am not called Ivy. (Sorry Av0gadro and Drahill.) In saying that, I understand that my maternal grandmother was a bit of groundbreaker, working in the defence forces in a near frontline role when she was younger. I wish I had an opportunity to meet her, however she died 2 months before I was born.
I really came to like and better suit my name when I changed by surname – from my father’s Eastern European surname (which has been passed onto grandchildren so will last for another couple of generations yet) to my mother’s Scottish/Irish sounding surname (that will possibly disappear after me if there’s no-one to carry on the family name).
I like the nick-name that came from changing my surname, “Mackey”. It is suitably gender ambiguous and best of all it seems suit me.
craftydabbler, PUH-LEEZE tell me what you consider “brown hair names.” I love the very idea.
@craftydabbler – is it like a name like “Krispin” which can mean red hair? (though this name also has other meanings as well.)
Baby Name gluts I have noticed over time & become sick of:
The time of the million Ryans!
Then Jessica! Tiffany! Ashley!
Travis, Trevor, Cody —the late 80s cowboy names trend!
Alexander/Alexandra—done to death mid 90s
Oliver! Oliver! Oliver! Oliver! (How many do you know?)
Riley–for boys or girls!
Natalies galore! Also: Jacks, Haydens, Jaydens, Isabelles and Sophias to the 10th power.
@PHDork: And…someone I know had twins & named ‘em Jack & Hazel!
“Krispin” makes me think of double glazed donuts, not red hair. And i LIKE red hair!
@Anka,
Cool! I’ll have to check those books out.
The names I hear repeatedly here are boy-ish names for girls (Riley, Payton, Madison – once knew a soccer team of little girls where 3 or 4 of the 10 were Madisons) and ultramasculine for the boys (Gunnar, Hunter, Wolf). I live in Oklahoma and most of the kids I hang out with are my very suburban niece’s friends, though.
Personally, I’m torn between giving my kid a really weird name (I have one, and I’ve slowly come to love it) or a very traditional one – so traditional, in fact, that it’s been in my family for hundreds of years.
I’m a girl and my name is Ariel. It’s actual a male name but sounds female. I’ve only met 3 other Ariels in my lifetime. 2 were boys and 1 of them I just met in my bowling class a few months ago. I was the first other Ariel he had ever met!
I actually don’t think my name really fits me but I love my name anyway. It’s uncommon, but most people have heard of the name before.
The only thing is, people pronounce it wrong when they read it off a paper. It’s pronounced Air-E-Ohl, but most people pronounce it R-E-Al. I prefer the wrong pronunciation over the real one anyway so I never correct them! Which means only my friends and family pronounce it right and people who don’t know me well pronounce it wrong. It’s a great way to tell who is my real friend and who isn’t
Oh, middle names… Ehsan is my middle name, I have nothing against my first name but it’s very much not me. After my eldest sister digging her heels in aged 11 and changing her name from the Iranian one she had to a very English one, and my middle sister having a name that works for both nationalities, my parents wanted to give me a British name too so I could choose. Goodness knows why they put it first and then never called me by it, I think I found out I had it as a name when I went to school!
My mother (Edith Margaret) goes by her middle name, as did my aunt (Alwyn Jean) and their mum (Maud Marion). You’d think after that, she’d have put the name she inteded to use for her daughter first!
my name is pretty common, and in high school I got nicknamed “skara” which has stuck among a few people, but I wish it had spread more, since I love the unusualness of it. my middle name is Elizabeth, and ever since I can remember I’ve wanted to go by some nickname variation of that. even now, I like the idea of being “Liz.” I do really like my name though, and think it suits me. I think I just like the idea of nicknames.
@PhDork, Mackey – Brown hair names aren’t names that mean having a particular color hair, they are just names I associate with brown hair. The name I really wanted to give if I had a daughter was Athena. The others were Sophia, Genevieve, Ananda, and Catherine. My daughter was quite a surprise as she was born with red hair. We found out later that my husbands dad had red hair as a kid, an uncle of mine had red hair (he died young), and supposedly my grandmother had red hair, but she dyed it her whole life so I’m not sure that is true.
I’ve been having big problems with my name recently, because a discussion came up in my literature class how flowers are the symbol for anything that’s beautiful but without substance or doesn’t last very long. No one wants to feel like that’s who they are, though. I also grew up Catholic and my parents made an effort to name each of their children after saints, and while some of the saints have really kick-ass stories behind them, clothing homeless people and fighting dragons, St. Rose of Lima was (imagine this) famous for her beauty. My full name is “Rosemarie Eulalia,” which sounds obnoxiously Disney-princess-esque to me. I’ve been trying to decide whether I want to go by Rose or Rosemarie or throw it all out the window and go by Bobo, which is a family nickname.
I used to loathe my name which isn’t actually emily (a name I stole from my sister as I was alway envious of the fact that growing up there were no Emilys in our class but tons of kids with my name, oh how times change).
Anyway I so despised the name I was given that I really wanted to give my daughter a name that wouldn’t be common, unfortunately my husband and I also wanted to give her a name that had resonance for us and the name we ended up with is increasingly popular particularly in the UK so there’s a strong chance she’ll have exactly the same situation I had growing up.
My son on the other hand has an Irish name which while popular in Ireland is barely heard of in the US, where people constantly mispronounce it. I sometimes wonder if he’ll hate me for giving it to him.
As a side note I wanted to call him Oscar but my husband flatly refused, and yes it did make me think of Oscar the Grouch but I chose to um ignore that.
@pilker – I am late late late to coming back and checking this thread but oddly, my grandmother’s name is Mildred and she FORBADE me from using it for any of my future kids, as did my mother. Personally I think “Millie” is such a cute nickname it almost redeems it, but since people with that actual name hate it so much I will respect their wishes.