As many of you already know, we are not going to divulge the name of our son until we can properly introduce him to everyone at the hospital when he’s born. With that said, the name is not yet fully decided. There is a name that has been atop Keri’s leaderboard for about two months now that has been growing on me… but it has not been officially decided upon yet.
It turns out that names can be pretty interesting to peruse and read about. At least I think so. There is quite a responsibility in naming something – especially a human being. In biblical times names were very important, and the meaning of a given name was the primary motivation behind applying it to an individual. A good meaning is nice, but so is a name that sounds good. For us, we have to be careful that our kid’s name doesn’t sound like a neighborhood, and we certainly can’t use a nature name. We also don’t want to pick a name that is really common right now (so anything in, say, the top 25 is out). We want something distinctive but not weird.
For your fun and perusal, then, I present some interesting name links.
Social Security Website – look at most popular names by year or decade back to around 1900. You can also search by state.
The Baby Name Wizard. Interesting site that will show you the popularity trend of a given name. Also you can find a link to buy the name book that we bought.
BabyZone has a decent site too. There popularity list is different.
Finally, there’s a decent site at iVillage.
It’s fun to look at names, their meanings, their popularity, etc. Among the current trends: Celtic names are very cool, names ending in -en (or variant) are very common, last name names (especially tradesman names) are pretty popular, Old Testament names are on the rise rather than New Testament names. Just don’t try to guess what we’re going to do!