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?
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.
I tell people you only get one freebie when having a kid: giving them a sensible name. Don't give them a dumb name that they have to introduce themselves with for years to come. The only acceptable follow-up sentence to "Hi, my name is Blue" is "....and my dad is Jay Z".
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. :)
My wife (25) has the name Lisa, which is the mother of all fad names: Not even in the top 500 U.S. female names today, but it was #1 for eight years straight during the 1960s.
She doesn't really love the fact that "Lisa" almost always refers to a 45-60 year old woman.
Not exactly fad names, but my name is Harry and my wife's name is Alice. We're both ~40 but have names that were more common for people born several decades before us. It's kinda fun.
Side note: In Sweden, Harry has once again become a quite popular name for children. My two-year old is named Harry and out of 15 kids at Kindergarten, there are two Harry :)
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.
Ah yes my dear
“F0D76E4270E41C4E3DBAAD6947647DB3EDFDF3F35623133880A429DE8E749AA6”. So cute! Just rolls off the tongue.
My daughter has a pretty uncommon name, and I was reading an NPR article and realized the journalist had given her daughter (who is the same age as ours!) the same name. You just can’t win.
If you want to build character, learn some patience, you should name your kids Zaden and Zelda, right?
You'd use a pronounceable encoding scheme like proquints[0] so your child would be called Zagil-kunaf-lagoh-dudav-gukup-pujon-hitoh-lukug-vulut-zazug-batip-bikop-mafoh-foliv-munuh-nopok.
You must be pretty optimistic about humanity's future if you're using a 256 bit hash. Just "Zagil-kunaf-lagoh-dudav" ought to be enough for anybody.
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!
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.
I distinctly remember things being sorted by first name way back in the "you're still learning the alphabet" grades (probably 1st grade). Likely to avoid confusing us since we call each other by first name. Its possible your school didn't do it or its possible you don't remember.
It is a thing, and there's evidence for it in certain academic fields. [0] studies this effect in economics, and this would be reason to expect similar things in other fields like maths, CS, and physics where alphabetical surname order on research papers is standard. Modulo a lot of context, replicability issues, and the like (and of course career choices), there's a chance you actually are doing your daughter a tangible favour this way. :)
> Faculty with earlier surname initials are significantly more likely to receive tenure at top ten economics departments, are significantly more likely to become fellows of the Econometric Society, and, to a lesser extent, are more likely to receive the Clark Medal and the Nobel Prize.
> These statistically significant differences remain the same even after we control for country of origin, ethnicity, religion or departmental fixed effects. As a test, we replicate our analysis for faculty in the top 35 U.S. psychology departments, for which coauthorships are not normatively ordered alphabetically. We find no relationship between alphabetical placement and tenure status in psychology.
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.
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.
-- 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.
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.
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.
I have an impossible to prove theory that the rise of boys named Aiden coincides with thst being the name of Carrie Bradshaw's nice guy boyfriend on sex in the city. Girls that watched in their teens and early 20s liked him and when they had sons of their own the name was on the short list.
That's very possible to prove in non-english-speaking countries, where surges of foreign names (along with some very creative misspellings) usually coincided with the first run of a foreign TV drama that had a character named like that, shifted by a few years.
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?”).
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:
Having a very common name is also awkward when you know many other people at your work with the same name. Getting emails accidently meant for them. Hi John this is John, etc.
Taking the name of family members -- either given or surname, was super common before the 20th century. I've done some ancestral research and come across towns in the late 1700s that were full of people with the same five first names, which is maddening if you're trying to determine which of them is your ancestor.
The great thing about being a hacker, I think, is that you're allowed to choose your own identity. At my last conference, I got to hang out with Ingy döt Net, and he's a fine person and his name's fine too. Sure it's not "normal", but honestly why would that matter? The proof is always in the code.
My uncle is really into genealogy and apparently “Severin” is an old family name. The problem is if I named a boy that people would probably just think we were SUPER into Harry Potter, because of the close similarities to a certain potions Professor.
In the region I was born in it was customary to name your firstborn after your father or your mother, and then your second child of the same sex after one of your parents' siblings, if none applied you'd turn to uncles/aunts, and so on.
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.
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.)
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.
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!
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!
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."
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.
Pat, for example, appears on both, that and Theo and are short versions of male and female names, rather than being names that have swung from female to male.
Jan and Jean could both be caused by migration, as they are both very long-standing male names in some countries and female names in others.
Toby is a very long-standing male name (Sir Toby Belch, not Dame Toby Belch).
Very few of the names on the female-male list have the same kind of significant swing present on the male-female list. None of them are like Allison, Beverly and Lauren.
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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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. :-)
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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
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?