How to Name a Baby (2013)

A lot of name trends automatically sort you into boxes. Sometimes based on class or (parental) income, sometimes skin colour or ethnicity, sometimes religion, and of course level of education¹. Whether you want to have you child deal with those stigma or not is a personal choice, but you can't change how people perceive names overnight.

Personally (and I actually get to do this in March) I would never use a name that strongly ties a child to religion or any other stigma that might hold them back.

It shouldn't be, but nomen est omen holds true.

1: If someone in the Netherlands names their son 'Jayden' or 'Mason', they probably didn't go to college. Yes, that is a horrible thing to conclude based solely on a name, but that is how names tend to work. Primate pattern-searching brains, remember?

The childs name is just the hash of the two parents names plus the birthday timestamp. This would resolve any infidelity questions.

In all seriousness I have a different strategy. Pick an "A" name. Many lists are sorted alphabetically and at the grade school level its often by first name. As trivial as it may seem, having your name appear first on a list feels like you "won". Might even be enough to give my (currently hypothetical) kids some slight advantage. Aaron and Abbey are optimal.

   -- Not repeated in family, friends or celebrities
   -- Not too common or uncommon (300-400) in the rankings
   -- Easy to say (and yell)
   -- No spell needed

   -- Not too bound to any country
   -- Name.surname@gmail avaible.

Ryker and Kyler are more popular than Philip and Scott. It's done, just shut the whole thing down.

I got around the baby fad thing by just naming our kids after family members. It’s boring, but you don’t need an interesting name to have an interesting life, and I’m not sure I like the idea of expressing your personal quirkiness by burdening your kids with a lifetime of tediously spelling their name to customer service reps.

I wonder if our daughter is going to rebel against having such a 'boring' name by giving her kids a really odd name that is hard to pronounce and spell and start the cycle again.

We followed nearly all of the advice just from following our own worldviews and from taking simple approaches to the "problem." 1) No candidate names were discussed outside of the immediate family 1a) To make discussing the baby easier, we had a "project" name as a placeholder, so we could refer easily to things having to do with the baby without being limited to saying "the baby" all the time. Our code name was "Spartacus." So it was, "What color should we paint Spartacus's room?", etc. 2) We stayed away from anything in the top fifty (or one hundred), and we used Babynamewizard to help with that. No one wants to be the third instance of a name in their classroom or circle of friends. 3) We wanted a name that was easy to spell and that people were familiar with, so we weren't going out on a limb and creating a name or repurposing a noun to be a name (e.g., "Feather","Tiger", &c.). 4) We wanted something from the family if we found something we liked and that met the other constraints.

Finally, when we found one we liked, we quickly agreed and it was an easy call. Then just wait for the big "day of delivery."

Reveal: We had a boy and went with 'George.' (Post hoc discovery: living in LA, I now know to say "George with a G" or else "Jorge" may be written down instead. It's a tiny thing & not a real issue — and kind of funny, tbh.)

A unique or exotic name would make it too easy to find them online, and I rather give them the choice of privacy and control.

My wife and I divided up the responsibility when we were expecting 20 years ago: she would choose a boy's name, I would choose a girl's name. Coincidentally we both ended up choosing Arthurian names: Tristan for a boy, Morgana for a girl.

Clearing firstlastname.com domain names was straightforward, and ultimately we had a girl, so Morgana it was. Unfortunately Morgan was a common enough name that people initially try to pronounce it as Morgan and then get stuck when they see the vowel on the end, but this problem went away after the BBC show Merlin happened.

One additional unplanned bonus was that her full name is alliterative, given both first and last name starts with "M". I do think there's nice stickiness bonus to alliterative names, as evidenced by comic book and other fictional character names. It's just one more factor to consider.

1. should be pronounceable in every primary languages my family speaks.

2. no automatic stupid nicknames

3. not the name of people we know and don’t like.

Working as a web developer, occupational reflex made me do a quick check every time my wife and I came up with a name for our kids.

The best advice I have for anyone choosing a baby name, don't care what other people think. People are surprisingly opinionated when it comes to baby names, most family and sometimes friends.

This is not surprising at all. Utah and Idaho Mormon culture is famous for being a veritable stew of bizarre names, everything from derivatives of Book of Mormon characters to alternate spellings unique to a single person in the world. It is the crucible in which new baby names are forged.

Googling for "Utah Baby Namer" is enlightening.

I lace sure to give my sons simple, common, international first names. And just one per kid (no second, third etc. first names)

I always wanted kids with unique names. It's purely a result of that.

Oh well. At least I personally know I didn't name him after a fad.

Isn't that because many people name children to honor relatives/ancesstors of theirs. i.e. unless you are naming someone the second, third, fourth, I'd think its more likely for a name to skip a generation. So jennifer might not be popular now, but it might be again be popular with jennifer's grand children / great grand children.

heck, their data shows thats the case for Emma!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_name [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_name

Some cool (but not so weird) alternatives to popular US names.

But maybe this is an option avaiable just to HN readers. :-)

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/

- can't contain R so wife can pronounce it, so no Klara for us

- can't be in top 10 in countries we are going to settle (since my own name was extremely common when i grew up and didn't want my children to experience other 4 children in their class with same name, i feel pity for my sisters children which both carry names in top 5), but also nothing weird. so my favorites (but sadly also everyone's else) Adam and Anna were out of question

- length should roughly match my family name for balance (since children carry my family name, combination with Chinese would look a bit odd in Europe)

- it should be written same way in multiple languages (English/German and my own language) for international use to avoid mistakes (one of benefits of my own name)

- didn't want certain origins of name to imply nationality, for instance I liked Alina but have to pass after finding it's mostly Russian name

- nobody in extended family should carry these names (first child name i met twice in my life, second child once in my life though it was my very close female coworker known even by my wife, so it took few weeks to disassociate her from my child name, it helped it's years since we worked together and my wife had always multiple other options though this was my first choice after eliminating many of my favorite names)

- no infamous celebrities should carry it in countries we are going to settle (we were sure about two countries)

- i am big fan of names beginning with A and in general beginning of alphabet, so bonus points for beginning, it almost never hurts being on beginning of list if sorted by given name

Things we didn't care about:

- proximity between birthday and name day (i have like less than 5 days, first child exactly one week, second child months)

- out of 5/6 letters of their names both children share same 3 letters core, though most of the people would never notice it

- if someone else carry exactly same given and family name, though combination should be completely unique, pretty sure there is zero people in world carrying same combination as second child, first child extremely rare since also my family name it's very rare

- not easy to make fun of name, since any name which came to my mind i could ridiculous and i am sure children have even bigger imagination, so unless it's really obvious one should not bother trying to avoid it