Baby Names
Where do you get your inspiration?
Where did you get your naming inspiration?
We have no clue what we are naming our daughter. I've looked on all the different sites for names, but nothing stands out.
I'd like to find that one name that just stands out from all others. So far no luck.
How did you decide on a name? Or do you have any advice on finding some new names? All the sites seem to have all the same names.
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Re: Where do you get your inspiration?
For our phantom DD, we want to name her after my mother but without using her exact name. DH is from Russia, so we looked at Russian variants of it and found one we love. The MN came from a song I love, and then we realised how much it ties into other aspects of our lives, as well as my mother.
For a son, we looked at names with a strong meaning that went along with phantom DD's name. The one that went along with it best happened to also be one I have always loved.
Any names we look at for other potential future LOs have names with meaning that go along with the above. Might sound cheesy, but I feel strongly that names can help determine a child's future.
When you find inspiration, send some my way! When naming DD1.0, DH was set on a name and I didn't hate it, so it was easy. This time, we're both blank slates. Poor kid will stay Malibu Barbie forever.
I like a lot of the name lists on Nameberry...it helps narrow things down if you're looking for a particular vibe or have a certain name style.
I also like to go to the top 100 (or more) of the SSA name list for different years. Since I like older names, I'll look at the lists for 1890, 1900, 1910, etc.
Another place I get inspired is through movies and TV shows.
This board also helps. Sometimes a name will grow on me after I've seen it talked about on here a few times.
Appellation Mountain is a blog that has in-depth profiles of some (many unusual) names, which is nice.
Edgar Allen Poe and my husband.
My daughter is Annabel and my son is Michael (after my husband). I like older names, so I turned to some of my fave books and authors. I got quickly overwhelmed looking at names sites and reading the 10000000000 name books. Too much!
I also watched the credits of movies. Crazy, but there are lots of names rolling!
I keep a long running list and any time I run into a name I like- from a book, movie, someone I meet, a name I hear randomly, etc- I add it to the list.
I am ashamed to admit that the first time I heard my DS's name (Gareth) was when I lived in Ireland and heard it on a contestant on Dancing on Ice in 2008. I liked it and added it to my mental list, and mentioned it to DH when he hated every name on my original list. He ended up loving it.
DD's name came from an awesome girls' trip to this place:
DD's first name was DH's favorite name for a girl, her middle name is my mom's first name (and my middle name)
DH loved Olivia from the very very beginning, I wasn't completely sold until a week before my due date.
I have a little booklet from the 40s called "Is It A Saint's Name?"
Also looking at headstones in a cemetery or reading the obituaries.
Does anyone in your family do genealogy? That is a fun source too.
Most of our names are from family members, books I've read and public figures we admire. There are lots of other names I really like but they're not in the top 5 because I feel like I have a stronger emotional attachment to the other names given their sources. I really like Charlotte, I think it's very pretty, but I'm not as attached to it as the other names.
Can you think of something that means a lot to you as a person or a couple? A favorite actress? Or an attribute you'd like LO to have and look for one with that meaning?
DS is Theodore Robert. He's named after Theodore Laurence in Little Women, Theodore Roosevelt (we're history geeks) because he's our favorite president, and Robert E. Lee. Theodore also means "gift of God" which was one of the biggest selling points IMO. DH pushed hard for Robert. I agreed because I thought it went well and wasn't "in love" with anything else.
Geneology, Literature, and History/Language
I want to include -lynn as part of a girl's first name, because DH was very close with his aunt who passed away and her middle name was Lynn. I would use that as a middle name, but I have always wanted to pass on my middle name (Marie) to my first daughter, because it is also my mom's middle name, and my grandmother's first name.
So thus far I have thought of Ashlynn Marie, Raelynn Marie, Gwendolynn Marie, and I'm sure there are others.
For a boy, I would like to use my maiden name as a middle name, but we have no ideas yet for a first name.
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This is long and complicated, so skip if you're feeling busy, but it is a quirky story about name inspiration.
Background: Both DH and I happen to have 7-letter names for our first AND middle names. So we had decided that it would be fun to pick first names for our kids that also had 7 letters. All of us having 7 letter names is more subtle than, say, the Duggar family with all Js, or families where all the kids have Irish-sounding names, etc. Every once in a while, someone who is really observant will notice and ask us if we did it on purpose. They never expect us to say that we did.
Once we had the 7-letter thing figured out, it actually made the discussion a lot easier, because we didn't have SO many choices. Here's how we picked the other names:
First kid: DH had a name of a TV character that he really LOVED for the girl name and I was fine with it, so we went with that. We used my mom's mn for the girl mn. If she had been a boy, she would have been Zachary + my dad's first name as a mn.
Second kid: We ditched Zachary the second time around. I had three 7 letter boy names I liked. DH vetoed one and I nixed the other because it had been an old bf's name. The remaining name was our nephew's mn. So we asked him and his parents if it was okay to use his mn for our baby, and they loved the idea. For the boy mn, we used DH's grandfather's name. For girl names, we chose Jordana + my mn.
As it turns out our 2 kids are as follows:
TV kid + Grandma's mn AND Cousin's mn + Great grandfather
Our girl's name was inspired by the movie Love Actually. We watch it every year around Christmas, and both love the Aurelia and Jamie storyline. We each made lists of baby names we like, and Aurelia was on both of them! Voila.
No boy's name yet, so inspiration is still pending...
H and I don't have kids yet but we agreed on a boy and girl name while engaged.
The boy name: FN is H's grandpa's name. H is a spitting imagine of him as a 27 year old. The MN is the name my parents' would've used had they had any boys.
The only minor issue with the FN is I have an uncle that has that name. We're going to use it anyways though (if we have a boy).
The girl name is a variation of my grandma's (my dad's mom) name.
If we have two girls or two boys, it's back to the drawing board.