
How to Name a Baby (2013) - Tomte
https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/how-to-name-baby.html
======
blahedo
The author misses one useful strategy (or maybe it's just a sub-strategy of
#3): Pick a name that is a _former_ fad name. I was named after two uncles
(same name, one on each side!) and my name is wildly common in men 30-60 years
older than me and unusual in my age group. This is ideal: everyone knows how
to spell it, and nobody thinks it's a weird name, so I have most of the
advantages of an unusual name without the disadvantages. :)

~~~
empath75
I really wanted a daughter so we could name her after my great grandmother
Eleanor. I just love the way that sounds.

~~~
acidburnNSA
How much Gone in 60 Seconds influence do you think is at play?

~~~
SuoDuanDao
I thought it was influenced by Lord of the Rings. I guess the name just shows
up a lot.

------
Freak_NL
One thing I'm missing from this article is that a name is often one of the
first things people hear about you, and our primate pattern-searching brains
immediately use that to lay the foundations of their first impression of you.
When someone is juggling ten résumés for a job opening your name matters (even
though it shouldn't) — and that's just the obvious example.

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?

~~~
dagw
That is another reason why I wanted to give my daughter a boring 'normal'
name. I wanted he name to be as much of a blank slate as possible that people
would draw as few conclusions from as possible.

~~~
jerrre
A very common name also has its problems. Large chances of being compared to
peers with the same name for example.

------
IIAOPSW
Why is everyone ignoring the obvious solution.

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.

~~~
Moru
Most name lists I saw was sorted on family name, not first name. But I guess
that is country specific, just like some write dates as YYYY-mm-dd instead of
the day first... Just makes sorting a list that little bit more logical :-)

Everything that happened the first january I want in that pile, after that we
take second january and so on.

You want the news for fifth march 1884? Sure thing, just look thru that pile
with everything that happened the fifth march!

~~~
aplc0r
We were also usually listed by last name in my grade school. I remember that,
because I have a last name starting with a "W". Every once in a while for
things like waiting in line or taking turns in an activity, the teacher would
flip it to reverse alphabetical. I remember that always feeling pretty great.

------
kpozin
One important fact that many "baby-naming" materials gloss over is that you're
choosing not a _baby_ name, but a _person_ name. The child will carry that
name for their entire life, including adolescence and adulthood, unless they
get so sick of it that they decide to change it. To avoid the latter
situation, perhaps it's best not to choose something whimsical, ridiculous, or
creatively misspelled.

~~~
gammateam
its okay, the article goes into that.

I think its pretty insightful, basically you'll end up doing what everyone
else does, but now you will be cognizant of why. Or if your significant other
wants to argue over a ridiculous name, you have some rationale to point to.

------
StapleHorse
For our second the rules were:

    
    
       -- 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
    

Bonus:

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

In any case, whatever you choose you will love it. I remember not liking the
name of my daugther the first weeks, but now I think there wasn't any better
name than the one she has.

~~~
earenndil
Perhaps more interesting than name.surname@gmail, is namesurname.com. If you
have that, then you can just make your email name@namesurname.com.

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rayiner
[https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WpCuIur1YKg/Uqg3qVmmCUI/AAAAAAAAG...](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WpCuIur1YKg/Uqg3qVmmCUI/AAAAAAAAGqM/cmo9eJNj134/s1600/Top+weird+names.png)

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

~~~
newbrict
did you overlook MAXIMILIANO???

~~~
philwelch
Maximiliano seems like a relatively normal Spanish given name, and since
Spanish speakers are a growing demographic with higher fertility rates than
the US baseline, that's not too surprising. Unless there's a fad of Anglos
deciding to name their kids "Maximiliano". That would be weird.

------
empath75
I was giving my sister a hard time about naming her kids Liam and Aiden, and
she was like: ‘when I picked those names, nobody called their kids that.’ ‘And
you got those names from where?’ ‘A baby name book on amazon.’

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.

~~~
rayiner
I don’t understand why parents name their kids unique names. My name is
unique, and other than getting my first name as my gmail address, it has no
upside. I was constantly spelling it out until I decided to go by a short form
which is a normal name, but because nobody names their kids normal names
anymore I still have to spell it. (“What’s the name for the order? Gray?”).

~~~
DoreenMichele
I went by my middle name for years because it is the least weird of all my
names. My first, maiden and married names are all weird. I felt like you. Then
I read this article and it made my problems with my names pale in comparison
to the troubles one can have from a common name:

[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/03/identity-
the...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/03/identity-theft-racial-
justice)

------
dagw
Both my wife and I have quite odd names which were made fun of when we were in
school and are almost impossible to pronounce or spell correctly in English so
we gave our daughter a really simple 'boring' name that will work in just
about any language or country and no one will ever spell incorrectly.

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.

------
AceyMan
Fun article.

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.)

------
TheChaplain
I would pick a very common name.

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.

~~~
CoolGuySteve
That only helps if your last name isn't relatively unique. Or even worse, the
language of origin for your first name and last name don't match, so the pair
form an even more unique name.

I'm terrified of ever being in the news for anything.

~~~
femto
One strategy is to pick a famous name to go with the surname. Look up the
child's surname on Wikipedia and choose a first name from the disambiguation
page, or put your surname into a search engine and pick from one of the top
results. That way if the child wants their 15 minutes fame they have to
actually work for it!

~~~
mirimir
My parents did that. Long before Wikipedia, but the same idea. So my name is
relatively common.

------
contingencies
When I named my daughter four and a half years ago I had a few goals. Unique
but not wacky. Exotic but not obtuse. Clear but not dull. Short. Easy to
pronounce in different cultures where certain phonemes are difficult. Easy to
spell. Memorable. Story about naming to please both sides of the family. It
was an ask!

~~~
Brajeshwar
This is pretty much what I did about 10 years ago for my first daughter. I had
one additional - have a .com[1] available.

1\. [https://laaija.com](https://laaija.com)

~~~
cozuya
She'll get some strange looks if she ever travels to Latvia.

------
nkrisc
My approach was the Chief Justice test: how does "Chief Justice Firstname M.
Lastname" sound? Ideally the same name works with "Nickname Lastname, private
eye."

~~~
RhysU
Agreed. Pretend the kid is a judge or a war hero. Does the name fit?

------
gavinmckenzie
As if planning for a baby wasn't stressful enough, choosing a name feels like
a huge responsibility. Especially when you have a small number of peers who
either changed their name as adults or choose to be known by a middle name
rather than their first name, underlining that sometimes people dislike their
names enough to take the matter into their own hands.

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.

------
cthor
Are there any big examples of feminine names becoming masculine? It always
seems to go the other way.

~~~
pianom4n
bunch of examples here: [https://www.jefftk.com/p/name-gender-over-
time](https://www.jefftk.com/p/name-gender-over-time)

~~~
philwelch
Although part of the transition of "Angel" might come from the relatively
uncommon English name "Angel" being displaced by the Spanish name "Ángel",
which transliterates as "Angel".

~~~
madcaptenor
That's probably true; see also "Jaime". (And apparently "Joan", if that data
is correct.)

------
hprotagonist
my rules:

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.

------
geetfun
And don’t forget to make sure that whatever you name them, the associated
domain name eg. firstlastname.com is available.

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.

------
DigitalSea
We opted for Greek mythology. We named our son Daedalus and besides the fact,
people cannot pronounce it properly and we shorten it to just Dae, we love the
name. Cool little fact is if you search LinkedIn for the name "Daedalus"
nobody comes up with the name.

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.

------
SeanLuke
> Not sure who made Utah the name prophecy state, but that’s what it
> apparently is.

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.

------
BrandoElFollito
I have a crazy first-time (not uncommon but unpronouncable when outside my
country).

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

------
EADGBE
I was just sick of my internal ear perking up whenever I heard my rather
common name, and the call wasn't intended for me.

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

------
russellbeattie
I named my kid after my middle name, which was my grandfather's name, which
was his grandfather's name, and so on until at least the 1700s. Sadly, the
name - which admittedly has been generally popular for a few thousand years -
had a resurgence in 2002 and 5 years later yelling, "Alex!" at the playground
would get at least 3 or 4 boys looking up to see if it was their dad calling
to them.

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

------
voltooid
I remember reading about baby name fads that were caused by names of TV
characters. The one I remember is "Emma" catching on after the baby on the TV
show Friends.

------
compsciphd
The article talks about naming fads and naming fads appearing in waves.

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!

~~~
madcaptenor
I've heard (although there's not really strong data to support this) that
names run on something like a 100-year cycle, i. e. somewhat longer than an
average lifespan. You don't want to give your kid an old person name, and you
may not want to name them after a still-living relative but it's a good way to
honor a dead relative.

For example, my daughter's middle name (born 2018) is my grandmother's first
name (born 1923).

------
geoalchimista
There you go

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

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

------
aytekin
Don’t decide on a name before you see your baby’s face and first indications
of temperaments. You will be stuck with the name if you picked a wrong name.
My strategy was to pick 3-4 potential name but don’t get too hung up on any of
them. With my second, none of the names matched him. We started searching for
a new one. I am glad we did.

~~~
Markoff
baby face after birth looks completely different already after one month and
dunno how can you judge personality of few days old newborn since i guess you
are not gonna wait years to figure out the personality, which should be
illegal in most of the countries anyway and you must give name within
hours/days maximum usually

------
neves
When my wife was pregnant I programmed a web robot to extract the newborn
names from the nearby hospitals. With the list of the babies from the former 2
years I could remove the ones with ambiguous writing, and the most common
ones.

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

~~~
madcaptenor
As more of a stats person than a programmer, I used the "babynames" package
for R instead.

------
stolenmerch
There's probably someone right now generating baby names with a neural network
trained on a huge list of every SSN name used in the past twenty years.
They'll use one of these and become very minor celebrities for a week while it
goes somewhat viral on Twitter.

------
kwhitefoot
A lot of the comments here seem to assume that a person has only one given
name. Where I come from that is almost unheard of, most people have at least
two, and this means that the person can choose which one to be known by. My
wife used her middle name.

~~~
Markoff
middle name cause lot of troubles in databases in countries which use only two
names or even better Chinese characters which have very low limit on amount of
characters, most of Americans and other middle name nationalities have issues
with their bank accounts and other accounts in China which cause a lot of
trouble because you never know how they dealt with middle name in their
system, i heard this issue countless times in years there and i can imagine
issues even in European countries not used to middle names

~~~
kwhitefoot
> i can imagine issues even in European countries not used to middle names

Are there any? Pretty much everyone I know in Europe has at least two given
name and in some cases also two family names (Spain for instance). Here in
Norway it is also common to have a first given name that is actually composed
of two separate words without a hyphen, it looks like a name plus a middle
name but is in fact what Norwegians call a double name and the person is
addressed by both never by just one of them, see
[https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_over_norske_dobbeltnavn](https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_over_norske_dobbeltnavn).

And of course Icelanders don't use family names but instead use patronymics;
for instance Björk Guðmundsdóttir where Björk's father's name is Guðmundur
Gunnarsson and her mother's is Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir. They might or might
not have middle names.

If you design a user interface that asks for a name please just let the user
write the name as they wish with no restrictions on length and please don't
try to force a surname into one box and a given name into another and don't
forbid hyphens and spaces, etc.

------
EADGBE
They link to "Voyager"; but I'd like to point out SSA's dataset (For the US,
of course).

[https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/](https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/)

------
jetti
My wife is due in January with our first and we have been struggling to settle
on a name. We did do what was advised in the article and have decided not to
release our the name we settle on until the baby is born.

~~~
trentnix
Seven!

~~~
akg_67
One of my friend named her daughter Nana (seven in Japanese) 20 years ago and
when daughter was 6+, they got a dog so named him Seven.

------
Markoff
since my wife it's from China and I am from Europe it makes things more
difficult, our rules for both babies were:

\- 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

~~~
madcaptenor
I work with a Chinese woman who goes by Clara in English-speaking contexts.

~~~
Markoff
well their pronunciation of R it's very bad compared to Japanese which can say
it perfectly clear, not that English natives would set very high bar for
Chinese with R pronunciation, I come from Europe where you can pronounce very
clearly and sharp in many languages, so if you can't it seem like you have
problems with speaking

and of course i am taking about Chinese Chinese, not american Chinese or CC
exposed to English and other foreign languages since early childhood which can
improve their R, but usually if you wanna distinguish Japanese and Chinese
just ask them to pronounce R or even better RRRRR sound which it's completely
impossible for Chinese

------
Dramatize
Not sure if our Atticus Bear Smith is #2 or #3.

------
skookumchuck
When a couple tells me they have trouble coming up with a name, I invariably
suggest they name him/her after me.

~~~
Kirth
How's that going? To the best of my intentions I've only managed a goldfish, a
turtle and a horse.

Kirth is a good boy's name, by the way ;). Good training in patience when
explaining the pronunciation.

