Would you give a baby a "top five" name?

[Ester Maria]

Emily is a gorgeous name. :)

 

I like traditional, generational names EVEN if they happen to be very popular in a certain period. I would probably not give my child a name that half of the kids from the block (figuratively speaking) have, but popularity of the name is one of my least concerns when naming a child.

[In2why]

When I was growing up, there was a girl in my grade (who also lived up the street from me) who had the same first AND last name as me. And our middle names rhymed. Only caused a real problem when I managed to fail 11th grade French when I wasn't even taking French. :D

 

 

I had the exact same experience!!!!! The funny thing is we both took advantage of Drivers Ed at the same time. They went by a list, our name was called and we both showed up. Neither of us asked which one, because we both wanted to be in the first class lol.

She and I actually laughed about which transcripts we would use to apply for college.

[Spy Car]

My William is solidly a Will ... so is the boy 2 doors down. They managed to talk a boy in the homeschool teen group who goes by Will at home to be William, and my ds and the neighbor go by their locally accepted descriptors of "Big Will" and "Little Will" Big Will is 14, looks like he's ready for college football. "Little Will" is 13, looks like he's ready for fifth grade, so the descriptors work.

 

Yes, there are some "Wills," but when is the last time you met a little boy named Bill or *gasp* "Billy"?

 

Bill

[SweetMissMagnolia]

if I liked it enough sure would

:lol:

[freesia]

I would, and have if I liked it enough. I have one with a top 10, one with a no 77 (was over 100 when we named him,) and 2 that were around 20 when we named them (one of which has slipped to 90.) I choose names that dh and I like and have good associations with. After 10 years of classroom teaching that, in itself, is a tall order. :)

 

Anne

[Bluegoat]

I'd also like to add that I think it's easier when a really common name is followed by an unusual surname. But, the whole thing gets really confusing when a top 10 name is added to a top 10 surname. So something like "John Smith" back in the day when John was sooooo popular, is pretty tough on a kid because there may be eight or ten John Smiths in the county phone book.

 

My brother was named after my uncle whose name was just plain TOOOOOOOO popular that year. Our surname was very common in our county as we descended from one of the families who initially settled the area. At any given time there were 5-9 _____'s living in the area and at least three would be in the same phone number region. UGH....he constantly received phone calls for other people and when he was in elementary school there were two other _____'s besides him so the teacher started calling them all by their middle names - my brother hated his middle name such that it made him cringe to hear it - to keep them all separate. In high school, he was consistently mixed up when quarterly grades came out because of four other boys with his same first and last name. The secretary only kept track of middle initials and that is a MAJOR problem when two of the boys have the same middle initial. Sheesh....it was always a mess to straighten out until the principal forced the issue of tracking by full middle names instead of just initials.

 

Mostly, I'm all for choosing whatever you like that won't get the kid endlessly teased. But, on the other hand, I am against giving a really common first name with an already really common last name. That just gets really confusing.

 

Oh, and my brother's bank accounts were once frozen because a _____ in the community died...it was one of the guys with the same middle initial. They both banked at the same place. UGH! That took three days to fix and included my brother needing sworn statements from his doctor that he was not in fact, deceased in addition to paperwork from the social security administration.

 

Be kind to your children. :D Do not name your children John Smith and Hannah Petzold! (Okay, so Petzold probably sounds unusual to you...but, that family back in the 1850's settled in this area, they and all of their remote relatives, and now there are approximately 35 Petzold families in the county, of which, four Hannah's were in my choir. :001_huh:)

 

Faith

 

There is a man in our city who has (or had, he may have died) the same name as my grandfather. He's also quite a reprobate, and pretty much his entire adult life he's been getting calls, letters, and so on as a result of this other guy's activities. Police looking for him, collection agencies, and that kind of thing.

 

It was pretty annoying I think although after about 50 years it started to be rather funny as well.

[Mommy22alyns]

No, I personally would not give my child a super popular name. That was one of our big considerations in choosing baby names.

 

Rebecca was ranked #63 the year she was born. Sylvia was ranked #527.

Edited November 2, 2011 by Mommy22alyns

[classicHSmom]

Yes.

We chose a name that was in the top five, but didn't know it. I'd maybe use the first name again. I do wish, however, that we used a middle name that we loved, rather than a boring, old man name. Ds has many peers with the same name so it would be nice if we could just use his middle name sometimes.

[higginszoo]

Yes, there are some "Wills," but when is the last time you met a little boy named Bill or *gasp* "Billy"?

 

Bill

 

Just once in ds's 13 year lifespan have we run across a little boy named Billy.

 

My ds is named after my f-i-l, who goes by Bill, so that's our reasoning. If there hadn't been multiple nicknames, we probably wouldn't have named ds after f-i-l. We also broke a long-standing middle name tradition in order to give them different initials, hoping to alleviate confusion.

 

We still had issues with chart confusion when they were in the same orthopedic practice ... Bill was there for a hip replacement at 50, and Will was a baby with a club foot. I actually had a resident come in and look at my baby's hip before I realized what he was doing, looked at the chart, and pointed out that it was his grandfather's. Bill apparently had similar issues, but they figured out more quickly that he wasn't ten months old.

[ChristineW]

I nixed Emily with DD2 because it was too popular. DD1 has a name in the top 30 and a common last name. When we moved here two years ago, we discovered that there was a girl at our church with the exact same name. She's two years older and sometimes they have the same class.

[LibraryLover]

I enjoy traditional names. Many boys I know are named David. I know several Sarahs and Emilys as well. I think there is a reason some names are popular. :) I used to live in an area of CA where every other little guy was named Mohammed or Jose. :)

 

Tradition, tradition. :)

[sewingmama]

Yes and I did. I named my son James. I figured he would be 1 of 3 everywhere he went but so far he has been the only one in any class he has ever been in and I only meet another in a great once and while.

 

On the other hand my DS2 has a name that isn't even top 50. Yet everywhere I go there is another kid with his name :001_huh:

 

My DD has a super common name which is Top 10 in just about any country in the world -except Australia. I have never met another child with her name although I have met other adults. She is always the only one with her name in any class (or school for that matter).

 

I think it depends a great deal on the area you live in - James is always in the top 10 but I live in a low socio-economic area so there are few James' but millions of kids named Jayden and Mikayla. Classic is out where I live - trendy made up names are the go here. The two classic names in overuse here are Charlotte and Isabella - so if I stay away from those then I'm golden whether it's top 10 or not :D Bogans don't generally use the classics ;)

[eewaggie99]

Even if you don't give your child a popular name, watch out. Dh and I named our son after scanning the SSA lists, making sure we picked a name that wasn't even top thirty. The year ds was born, the name moved to top 5.

For dd, we did the same, again making sure we picked a name that wasn't top thirty and a nickname that wasn't top thirty as well. No luck. Again, the long name zoomed to top ten and there are a bazillion derivatives of her name.

[ereks mom]

I love that name! ;) I didn't intend to give EK such a popular name, but it turned out that way. I had picked the name way back when I was a teenager (1970s) , and never new anybody with that name. Suddenly, the year before EK was born (1993), it was the 5th most popular girl name! When she was born in 1994, it was 3rd, and from 1995-2007, it was #1! HOWEVER, we did change the spelling slightly--"ie" on the end instead of "y".

[ereks mom]

Even if you don't give your child a popular name, watch out. Dh and I named our son after scanning the SSA lists, making sure we picked a name that wasn't even top thirty. The year ds was born, the name moved to top 5.

For dd, we did the same, again making sure we picked a name that wasn't top thirty and a nickname that wasn't top thirty as well. No luck. Again, the long name zoomed to top ten and there are a bazillion derivatives of her name.

 

Pretty much the same thing happened to us.

[HS Mom in NC]

No way!

 

I was born in 1973 and was named Lisa. In a History class, seated alphabetically by last name, I was one of 4 Lisas in a row.

 

At one of my daughter's birthday parties a few years ago there were 12 girls-4 of them were named Grace.

 

Now it seems obligatory that if you HS and you are a fundamentalist or evangelical you have to name one of your children Joshua, Hannah, or Grace.

 

There are lots of beautiful names out there, I suggest staying away from anything on a Top 10 list.

[EmilyinND]

FWIW...I love the name Emily...:lol:

[Violet Crown]

There seem to be really three categories of name, not just "popular" and "unpopular," but "common," "uncommon," and "trendy." Both common and trendy names will show up in the top 100, but the common names have a (more or less) flat popularity graph across the years (though decreasing generally just because of the increasing fragmentation of the naming market), while the trendy names, though they may be less popular in numerical terms than some common names, have a spiking graph.

 

Emily is a combination name, with a flat graph until the 1960's, a spike peaking around 2000, and a sharp decline since (though only because it went from #1 to #6, well above its mid-200s ranking in 1960). So it's a classic name that gained in popularity in the late 20th century. As a comparison, Anna is an equally classic name, but has had a firmly flat graph since about 1930, having failed to get on board the nouveau classic trend of the turn of the century. This would make it common, but not trendy. As another comparison, Kayla/Kaylee/Kaylin etc. went from nowhere to insanely popular, making it trendy (by my categorization).

 

So the question with popular names is, if you don't mind popular, do you want trendy, or common, or trendy/common (like Emily)?

 

ETA: I got the worst of all worlds (poor me), with a name that had been trendy, going from zero to Top 10 in the 20th century, but overused and so being dropped like a hot potato by everyone except my parents by the time I was born. Geez, Mom, couldn't you have Googled the baby name sites?

Edited November 3, 2011 by Sharon in Austin

[twoforjoy]

If I liked it, yes. Probably.

 

Our kids are all named after their great-grandparents. So, we didn't take current popularity into consideration, we just used the names (none are all that popular, though).

 

If we were picking a name that didn't have any family significance, we might take popularity into consideration to some degree, but it wouldn't be a deal-breaker.

 

I really like the name Emily. I'd use it regardless of popularity. (If we ever have another girl, I'd like to name her Charlotte or Eleanor, even though both of those are kind of trendy right now, at least among people I know.)

Edited November 3, 2011 by twoforjoy

[AmyP]

I have a top 5 name and all 4 of my kids do, too. I even have an Emily (named after my mom - was Emily popular in the 40s? Probably!).

 

I've gone through times when I didn't like having a popular name, but I got over it. :D

[Embassy]

My favorite name for my daughter was a top five name, but I wanted her to have a name that wasn't common. So the top five name became her middle name. I chose an uncommon name (maybe top 200) with normal spelling. For my boys they received names within the top 30, but not the top 5.

[Danestress]

I would pick names that are top five if they were roughly top 20 for a number of decades. So Emily, Anne, Charles, William - these are names I like and would use.

 

I would not use a top 10 name that was only top ten recently. Cody, Sierra, Tiffany, Aiden, Kayla, Riley .... these are names I would not use because they seem very trendy to me.

 

I wanted my children to have names that when you see it on paper, you have no idea if the person is a child or an adult. "Jack" is very popular, but there are old guys named Jack, middle aged guys named Jack, and many babies named Jack. Same with Emily. To me, those are good names.

 

Some of my friends gave their children names that are very unique and that I quite like, so I have nothing again unusual names, but for my children, I chose very solid, traditional, simple names that don't call attention to themselves.