Tuesday 6 January 2015

Naming a baby - first name edition

New Zealand's most popular baby names of 2014 have just been announced by the Department of Internal Affairs, which I always find interesting and particularly so this year, since we contributed to the list.

Naming a baby is a pretty daunting undertaking - it's kind of a long-term decision. We treated it like we do most other things, which is to say, we read all sorts of information and looked at (too much) data and made lists. Not everyone will take our approach but I thought I'd share our thought process.

We wanted a name we both liked
The obvious first! I read somewhere that you never realise how many people you don't like until you try to name a baby. We didn't veto too many this way but it was interesting how easy it was to strike quite a lot of names out immediately as one or the other of us just didn't like it.

We wanted something easy to spell and pronounce
Keeping it simple... But actually we haven't quite succeeded because it turns out that there is another way to pronounce our boy's first name that we weren't aware of until after we'd given it to him. It wouldn't have changed our choice but we thought we were safe on that front!

It had to work with our surname
A friend said to me the best way to test a name was to go to the back door and yell it into the yard a few times. The neighbours might think you're nuts but you'll get to hear how it sounds... And let's be honest, that's about the only time you use middle names, right? We also were keen to avoid awkward initials and I had a weird obsession with the rhythm which, once we'd chosen a short first name, had me seeking a middle name with at least three syllables. I don't know either. I'm weird.

We wanted something that wasn't too popular... Or too rare
Picky, I know. We found a really cool tool called NameVoyager which maps popularity of names over time - it's US data so not quite applicable here but still very interesting. Go and type in your name - you might be surprised at the trends (for example, in the late 1800s Elizabeth was sometimes used as a boys' name). We actually used the graph from this site in our birth announcement. We're nerds.

Closer to home we checked out the DIA name lists, and struck out a few names for popularity.

Though as with any decision where there are too many options one needs some arbitrary conditions to narrow the field, the popularity condition is not really terribly important these days - even the most popular names aren't used by that many people. Young Sir's name comes in at #89 on the DIA list, with 49 other little New Zealanders sharing it with him. Even when added to the longer version of the name (#63) there are still only 121 kids his age in the country with that name, so the chance of one being in his class are pretty slim. Apparently in the US in 1880 25% of boys were given one of the top four names; now it's less than 4%. We're all a whole lot more creative than we used to be!

If you're looking for a baby name sometime soon you might find some of this useful - or you might have a completely different set of criteria. So long as you end up with something that works for your child it doesn't really matter!

If you have kids how did you choose their names?

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