How do you choose a baby name?

[oraetstudia]

Do you name your kids after someone? Stick with all the same initials? Choose at random? Do you worry about what the initials spell or if all the kids names fit together with each other?

 

I'm pregnant with our 7th child and I think I am out of names. All of our kids have very British names. One is named after a relative, but the rest were simply given names we liked. I do try to make their names all sound like they fit together and I worry about initials.

 

I think this poor child is just going to be nameless.

 

So how do you pick names?

[vonfirmath]

We find names we like

 

Generally, they are biblical names. Often they have meaning in our family/group of friends. We like their meanings and how the name flows.

[TGHEALTHYMOM]

www.parentsoup.com

 

has a baby name finder and meanings of names.

 

You still have some time, no worries!

 

Baby 8 is due June 7th here---- I recently attended a hs conference

with a girlfriend who kept throwing names out... late at night.

 

None of them worked for me, so I prayed...woke up at 4 am and had it!

 

The longest time it took was with our 5th child... 3 days after he was born. Same scenario, but I woke up with his too!

[WistfulRidge]

I keep lists of names that I like. I like incorporating family names (thus far as middle names), but I don't consider family names mandatory. When I'm pregnant I bring out my lists of names and talk them over with DH - he'll veto any he can't stand and make any suggestions if he has a name he likes that is not on the list. DS1's name is the boy name we had picked out from the very beginning. For DS2 we had a short list of two first names that we loved to go with his middle name (after DH's dad) and we decided after he was born.

 

For me it it is important that the name sounds good and flows well together. In an ideal world all of the kids names would sound like they "belonged" together... but I know that is going to be blown if we ever have a girl because we tend to prefer solid, classic boy names (like David) but we like more romanticized, not-as-common girl names (Vivienne, Allegra, Theresa, Liliana etc).

[MrsBear]

First DS = Name we liked, DH's grandmother's maiden name, Last name

 

Second DS = Name we liked, my mom's maiden name, Last name

[bluemongoose]

We have a few naming "rules" for our family :lol:

 

1. All members of our family have their own first initial. This makes it easy to label things.

 

2. All middle names are after a family member somewhere on the family tree that we liked and was someone we could share good stories about to the namesake.

 

3. They cannot end in r. Our last name has way too many r's in it and it just sounds wrong.

 

4. We have to be careful about names that are also words with our last name. Our last name sounds like a common word and many names put with it turn out really bad!

 

5. The initials cannot spell a word that is bad or is an acronym for something bad that would cause the child to be teased. (We google it)

 

6. No one syllable names as our last name is one syllable and it sounds choppy.

 

If the name we pick follows these rules and both DH and I like it, we use it.

[hsmamainva]

1st -- great-grandmother's first name - own middle name we liked

 

2nd -- variation of great-uncle's first name - grandfather's first name is his middle name

 

3rd -- own first name we liked - uncle's first name is his middle name

 

4th -- variation of great-aunt's first name - own middle name we liked

[Tasia]

For first names, we just went with names that we liked that went well with our last name. We also made sure that none of the boys have the same first initial and none of their names end with the same sound (ie. we wouldn't use Joshua and James or Aaron and Dylan).

 

Middle names are family names. The older three boys each have two middle names.

[SilverMoon]

Our kids all have old Irish names. They do "coordinate" somewhat, with the same amount of syllables and general sound. We didn't actually intend that coordination at first; our first three just did, and it felt wrong not to keep up the trend. :001_smile:

 

The definitions don't have to be amazing, but they do have to be positive. Like one just means from the land of the lochs, where the vikings lived. (He wore 3t size clothing by 18mo so maybe it's appropriate anyway. - lol)

 

DH generally waits for me to search all over and put together a list of names I like. Then he vetoes 75% of them and we work with what's left.

 

I usually rely on sites like babynamesofireland.com or some such to come up with that list. A google of "British baby names" turned up a few that looked similar.

[Jpoy85]

Ns first name I randomly picked. His 2 middle names are after my dads middle name and my moms dads first name. He has my maiden name. (last male to carry it on)

 

Cs first and middle name are randomly picked by DH. She has my married name.

 

Ls first name is after DHs middle name. Her middle name is after C's twin brother's first name, that we lost in utero. She has my married name.

 

The baby we lost in 09 first name was randomly picked and his middle name was after DHs moms middle name.

 

IF and when we get preg again, the boy will be named after my grandpa and my dad. The girl will be named after my grandma and my BFF.

[NASDAQ]

In our religious tradition we name for people who have died, as close to their exact name as possible.

 

dd - My MIL's first and middle name.

ds1 - My husband's grandfather's first name; my great-grandfather's as a middle name.

ds2 - My father's first and middle name.

[oraetstudia]

I am glad I am not the only one with rules. Though I have broken one. My husband and I have the same first initial, so I used to say I would never use it for my kids, but we have used it -- twice.

 

I have an old baby name book of British names and realized recently that every name we have used, except for one middle name, could all be found on one two-page spread. Unfortunately, I don't think I like the rest of the names on those pages. I kind of wish we had found out what we are having to narrow the search a bit.

[ocelotmom]

1. All members of our family have their own first initial. This makes it easy to label things.

 

I have the opposite rule (though not necessarily hard and fast) - I'd prefer they all have different first names so that I can use initials unambiguously.

 

All our names so far are Scandanavian, with a variation on "Thor" for the middle name, because that's DH's thing and I'm happy to give in on that if it gives me more leverage over the first name :) (though I'm not sure what we'll do if there are future babies, as I feel like we've exhausted the Thor-variations that I find acceptable.) I felt strongly about DD2 having a different middle name, so she has two middle names :p

[Danestress]

I dislike family theme naming. To me, each child will live - God willing - many more years out in the world than in his sibling group.

 

The name has to sound good with our last name. Two of our children have family names. They all have fairly common names. I didn't want my children to have names that are strongly associated with a certain decade.

 

I didn't want names that are too evocative of a personality type. So no names that say "I am expecting this child to be girly girl" or "my boy will be a bruiser." I wanted names that work ok across types. I didn't want a name that sounds great if your daughter does become a debutante as expected, but sounds dumb if she chooses to be a welder. So for each name I would think, "will this name ok if my child is an attorney? How about if he is a science kid? What about if he is pudgy? How about if he wants to play football?" The name had to work even if the kid turned out really different than we expected.

[Leanna Tomlinson]

I'm pregnant with our 7th child and I think I am out of names.

 

You are not alone.....

 

We are expecting #8 and are out of names too. I can't find one girl name I like that is not either overly popular, used by a niece or nephew, or is already one of my dc's middle names.

 

All of our current dc have names that are tied in some way to the family tree. The family tree is exhausted, but I do want the name to have some significance.

 

If anyone can find a girl's name that means "surprise!" - I'll consider it.

 

oraetstudia - if you come up with a list, please share, maybe I'll use one of your rejects.

 

BTW- we don't know what we are having, but we do have a boys name.:)

[mommy5]

We like old fashioned names and names that have really nice meanings. With a few of ours the name sort of just came to me ... in the others we did more research.

[Scuff]

Ds is nmaed after dh. For the others, we had decided that we would have 1 bIblical or hebrew name and 1 family name. The names also need to mean something nice. So no Miriam because it means bitter. And they neem to not be very, very popular. (though i made an exception for Hannah, because i absolutely loved it and wanted to name a child that since I was young. Unfortunately we lost her ina miscarriage.)

 

First two dds follow this. By #4 we had a very hard time agreeing on anything. Dh wanted to throw everything out and just pick something he liked. But I didn't like anything he came up with and disn't want to completely let go of our naming rules. Eventually we settled on a name he picked out that I mostly like and a name I picked out that he mostly liked. I won the first name. :) She does have a biblical name, but not family, so we thought. After she was born I found out that both her names belonged to distant reletives on my side. Not the same as "you're named after grandma that you love", but it works. This last baby will be named after dh's grandma who recently passed. I've suggested it in the past, but he didn't want to use it. Now he does. We're still debating a middle name.

 

In all of this, unintentionally, but I like it, all of our girls have first names that are uncommon and middle names that are more popular. I like that they aren't the 50th Aiden among rheir friends, but can use the more popular name if it serves them better in the future.

[LibraryLover]

Family connections, meaning. I like classic names, and I don't mind sharing good, strong names with others. ;) None of my kids' names happen to currently be on a hated list, but my boys have strong names which are not uncommon. Some names are 'popular' for good reason, is my figuring.

Edited May 9, 2012 by LibraryLover

[LibraryLover]

I still need four more kids. lol

Edited May 9, 2012 by LibraryLover

[oraetstudia]

I don't want names that are too popular either. I was even annoyed that one of my daughters' names showed up on the Freakanonics 2015 list, although due to recent royal weddings and their relatives, I now won't be surprised if the authors were correct. Hmph.

[oraetstudia]

But I suppose one good thing for me is that I don't have many relatives in my generation having babies to fight over the good names. One sil stopped at two and chose really popular names. BIL and his wife choose names that I would never use, because I think they aren't very attractive, and my brother and his wife haven't had kids.

Edited May 8, 2012 by oraetstudia
Typo

[LMD]

I'm pretty easy going - I like a lot of names! DH tends to feel very strongly, one way or the other, about names. We both get a sense of the name being 'right' somewhere along the way (before conception with our 3). We like names that have meaning, either sentimental, historical or etymological, and we like names that sit with our cultural heritage (ie, we pick names from our background culture - I like french names but wouldn't use one). Middle names are family names.

 

Our style tends to be a little unusual, but not made up, biblical and/or eastern european. I like a lot of british/celtic names too but DH isn't keen on many!

[Crimson Wife]

Nymbler.com is great for making suggestions based on names you enter. You could enter in your 6 kids' names and see what it comes up with.

 

My kids have Germanic names to honor MIL's heritage. They are also variations of family names but not the exact names (I share my name with my aunt and hate that in my 30's I'm still "little ____" :glare:).

[CAmomof4]

You should also check out http://www.babynamewizard.com/.

 

I've only used the book, not the site, but it's the same principle. With our 2nd child we were just drawing a blank. You look up the name or names you've already used, and it gives you suggestions for siblings' names that coordinate by theme. Each name appears in at least 3-4 different themes so you can take it different ways. We loved the suggestions it gave us.

 

Would've used it for my 3rd but he was a boy so naturally dad wanted a namesake!

[ocelotmom]

But I suppose one good thing for me is that I don't have many relatives in my generation having babies to fight over the good names. One sil stopped at two and chose really popular names. BIL and his wife choose names that I would never use, because I think they aren't very attractive, and my brother and his wife haven't had kids.

 

I had a name in mind for DD - Anneliese. Fits well with our naming scheme, and is kind of a combination of my maternal grandparents' first names. Not at all common, at least in the US.

 

My cousin, entirely independently (we never discussed baby names) chose it for her baby.

 

We have those grandparents in common (and that was her motivation for it, too), so it wasn't a totally random coincidence, but it still surprised the heck out of me!

[MamaT]

We picked names we liked, and that went well with our last name. With #1 and #4, dh had names he felt strongly about, so I went with it. Some of my children's names are popular, and some are not. I think my 15yo dd has only met one other Francesca.

[Mama_Rana]

I love baby-naming!!! I scoured baby-name books for meanings and all.

 

When my first son was born my husband and I agreed on a name that was a variation of his father and grandfather's name, and a middle name that was his other grandfather's name. It happened to end in an -m just like mine and my husband's [or at least our nicknames do].

 

So when I got pregnant again, we realized we would have to find another name that ended in an -m, so this second child wouldn't feel left out! :lol:

 

This was surprisingly hard.

 

Confounding the issue, 1) we wanted a name of a particular heritage and 2) I wanted to honor my grandfathers [or grandmothers if it were a girl].

 

We finally chose a name that fit those criteria, loosely in the case of the honoring: his initials are the same as my paternal grandfather's and his middle name rhymes with my maternal grandfather's and honors his occupation.

 

The girl's name we chose before knowing the sex did not end in an -m, but had a strong M sound in the middle and could be abbreviated to end in an -m. It was my maternal g-ma's first name and my paternal grandmother's maiden name.

 

 

 

I'm sorta wistful that she never came to be, though I would never trade in either of my boys. <3

[QuirkyKapers]

I bought a baby book and scoured through it. Their first names have the same letter sound. My sons middle name is after both grandfathers (my dh and my grandfather both had the same name). I chose my daughters because I liked it!

[Pamela H in Texas]

Well, our situation is different in that we also have to incorporate, to the degree appropriate for the individual child(ren), birth names. In our current situation (the three: V, A, and C), we decided to keep the names they were called (one name is being spelled differently). We then added a first or middle name (depending on kid) that had meaning for us. Two of the names were just very liked names of ours. The third was naming kid after my (step)dad. That kid is also going by initials. The girl also has a nickname for each name. We call each kid by the name they are called, their nickname(s), the new part of their names, and, of course, their full names.

 

Anyway, I'm sure you aren't out of names. Something just right will come to y'all :)

[peachskittles]

I will be having my seventh, our eighth, in August. I'm out of boys names that we like (6 of the 7 are boys) so I've been watching old movies to get ideas. I sometimes browse the family tree online to see if I like anything as well. Now if we have a girl, we won't have any problems. Well, we will, but not due to lack of names but to the overabundance of names that we really want to use (and with this being our last, this poses an interesting problem). :tongue_smilie:

[happypamama]

DD's name was just one we liked, and I wanted a Biblical name for DS1, so we picked one we liked. It happens to be a President's name, and DD's name happens to be a First Lady's name; those are complete coincidences. Those two names were easy. With DS2, we couldn't decide on a name at all, and it took five days after he was born to name him, but his name is so perfect for him. It happens to be a President's name as well, though it wasn't really intentional. So when we were expecting DS3, I thought we needed to pick a Biblical Presidential name so he wouldn't feel left out (of our girl choices, one is Biblical, and both are First Ladies' names); the pool was pretty small, especially for ones that weren't already used in our families somewhere. But it is a good name for him, and I like it. (He's Zachary; DH thought it was fun to have a Z for an initial.) :) All of their names are very traditional, top 100 sorts of names.

 

DD's middle name is my grandmother's middle name. DS1's middle name is DH's paternal grandfather's first name. We chose both of those long before we had any children. DS2's middle name is just one we liked that goes with his first name. DS3's middle name is one I really wanted to use, because it's DH's middle name and also the middle name of his other grandfather (which is what he went by). If we have another boy someday, I want to use my dad's first name as a middle name, and for a girl, my middle name (which my dad chose for me).

[LostSurprise]

We decided to do fairly normal first names, short--which fits with out last name (3 syllables).

 

Middle names we agreed could be more unusual and would honor family. Boys would honor my husband's family. Girls mine. With 4 boys, he got the best in that deal. ;) Lots of Scandinavian names culled from great grandfathers.

 

We had some problems with this too. We had a few boys names we liked (and lots of girls names) so by the time we got to #4 it was a bit of a stretch. I read through baby books and sites, but eventually I just read aloud from the social security name list and we made note of anything we liked.

[Stayseeliz]

Biblical or Christian first name. Family name for the middle name. http://www.behindthename.com is a great website!

[KrissiK]

I don't really remember how we chose the boys' names. I guess it's because they seemed to be solid, strong names -Daniel, Jonathan. Our first daughter was given a name we liked from a tv show. We didn't name her after the character, we just liked the character's name -Annabeth. Our second daughter came with her name and we felt she was too old to change it. Our third daughter came with a name, that we didn't like, but would keep as a middle name, so we had to choose a first name that would go with her middle name.

[LibraryLover]

Considering the Anneliese story. :)

 

One of my children shares a variation of a name with cousins. None of us knew how powerful those family stories meant to us until the this generation of babies were born. I love it. So many of us were so touched by our past, our history, even as some of us did not know the people themselves, that we named our children for them.

Edited May 9, 2012 by LibraryLover

[vonfirmath]

DD's name was just one we liked, and I wanted a Biblical name for DS1, so we picked one we liked. It happens to be a President's name, and DD's name happens to be a First Lady's name; those are complete coincidences. Those two names were easy. With DS2, we couldn't decide on a name at all, and it took five days after he was born to name him, but his name is so perfect for him. It happens to be a President's name as well, though it wasn't really intentional. So when we were expecting DS3, I thought we needed to pick a Biblical Presidential name so he wouldn't feel left out (of our girl choices, one is Biblical, and both are First Ladies' names); the pool was pretty small, especially for ones that weren't already used in our families somewhere. But it is a good name for him, and I like it. (He's Zachary; DH thought it was fun to have a Z for an initial.) :) All of their names are very traditional, top 100 sorts of names.

 

Laugh. Our son and daughter both have Biblical Presidential names as well (okay for my daughter its her middle name -- abigail)

[littlebug42]

My oldest daughter's name comes from this song by Beth Nielsen Chapman.

 

 

 

 

It is in honor of my friends from college and the deep love that we all share to this day. Her middle name is Grace because it means God's gift and with the difficulty we had conceiving her, it was appropriate.

 

Our younger daughter's name actually comes from one of the zookeepers on Crocodile Hunter, Kelsey. Dh liked the name and it was his turn to choose since I had chosen Sweet-Pea's name. It also went well with Elizabeth which was our chosen middle name.

[CAmomof4]

Among my kids' cousins are Madeline, Madison, Addison, and Emerson (all girls). They're all from my husband's side of the family. I'm glad we went a different direction!