What were you almost named?

[Arcadia]

My mom’s pick for my English name was Susan (sounds very similar to my Chinese name) or Prudence. She decided it is safer to let me pick when I am older since a deed poll doesn’t cost much.

My Chinese name was supposed to be the word for wisdom. However due to Chinese astrology, my parents picked something else for me. 

[Clarita]

My mom picked my name by randomly pointing at a map of California. She assures me if she had pointed to Bakersfield she obviously would point again, but then would she have known to try again if she pointed to Placentia... 

[Drama Llama]

Meg, or rather Margaret called Meg.  I quite like Meg, more than my own name.  

If I had been a boy I would have been Firstname Middlename Lastname V (as in the fifth).  I'm not posting that because it's my younger brother's name.  My mom had my brother, named him, had engraved birth announcement printed and placed in stamped addressed envelopes to send to the relatives in other countries.  At that point my Dad said "I didn't want to say anything, because I know it meant so much to you, but I don't really like my name."  My mom replied "What?  I don't either!"  But they'd already spent so much on engraving and stamps they just kept it.  It kind of amazed me that they'd been married 5 years and had 3 kids and never gotten around to discussing what to name a boy.  I subjected my poor DH to so many conversations about what to name our kids.  

[JessieC]

10 hours ago, *Jessica* said:

Layla.  Instead I was named after the Allman Brothers song Jessica. 

I was named after that song too! And another contender was Leda for some reason.

[Elfknitter.#]

10 hours ago, *Jessica* said:

Layla.  Instead I was named after the Allman Brothers song Jessica. 

I would've been a Layla, too, if my dad had not found my given name. Layla was very popular in the mid-70s. 😂

[fraidycat]

There was not an alternative name for me. Not even a boys name, so they would have been scrambling if I had been a boy. 
 

My (younger) sister and (older) brother had opposite-gendered names in the hopper - and mine is not one of the possibilities considered if brother was a girl. 😂 

[LifeLovePassion]

Not sure about me, but my younger brother would have been Molly. Mom never said what older brother or I would have been named.

[Farrar]

8 hours ago, Jann in TX said:

My Mom thought that she and Dad had settled on Michelle for my name if I were a girl...

Mom had C-section and Dad was asked to complete the birth certificate while she was still sedated. 

He chose Annette because of his high school crush on Annette Funicello...

When mom came to she told him to change it immediately-- since form was already filled out and signed they simply added a J

so my first name is 'Jannette'  (I've always been called Jann... in part due to this!)

My in laws got together in part because FIL had a huge teenage crush on Annette Funicello and MIL was an absolute dead ringer for her in her youth. He saw her in a department store and asked her out and the rest is history.

[purpleowl]

38 minutes ago, fraidycat said:

My (younger) sister and (older) brother had opposite-gendered names in the hopper - and mine is not one of the possibilities considered if brother was a girl. 😂 

We didn't have a boy until kid 3, but we changed our boy name between kids 1 and 2. Well, partly - DS's first name would have gone in the middle name spot if the first kid had been a boy. We got braver and moved it up front. 😄 And DS's middle name was not part of our original boy name choice. 

[freesia]

1 hour ago, fraidycat said:

There was not an alternative name for me. Not even a boys name, so they would have been scrambling if I had been a boy. 
 

My (younger) sister and (older) brother had opposite-gendered names in the hopper - and mine is not one of the possibilities considered if brother was a girl. 😂 

My parents always had a different set of names for each child. We planned to use Kayla each time we ended up with a boy. We have two girls, neither is named Kayla. 😂 We only agreed on four boy’s names (and couldn’t agree on the spelling of one.) So, ds 1 got my second favorite on the list ( for personal family event reasons we couldn’t use number one.) So, my favorite name was the boy’s name dd would have had. Ds2 got it and dd2 would have been the only boy’s name left. But she was a girl and not Kayla. In fact we didn’t totally settle on her name until close to her birth. We have a lot of girl names in common. I also have trouble committing to a name ( except ds2’s name) until I see the baby. 

[iamonlyone]

April Love (LOL, just no!) or Susan or Sally. I prefer Susan to my name, but my dad wanted all four of us to have names that started with "D."

[freesia]

Just now, iamonlyone said:

April Love (LOL, just no!) or Susan or Sally. I prefer Susan to my name, but my dad wanted all four of us to have names that started with "D."

April Love and Misty Dawn ( from above) are just so 70’s 😂 

[Melissa Louise]

Damien (if I was a boy) or Gaylong (Dad's crazy name he wanted)

[Melissa Louise]

I wanted to change my name to Aurora (grade 1) or Violet (grade 2) or Odette (grade 3).

[Eos]

Matthew or Nicholas.  I'm one of four girls so these were just on stand-by, never to be used.

[Shoeless]

I was going to be Tara, like after the house in Gone With the Wind, or Kimberly.

My roommate in college was Kimberly, but was almost named my name. We thought that was a fun coincidence. 

[J-rap]

I was going to be Brian.  Interestingly, my middle school locker was next to a boy whose entire name was what I would have been if I had been a boy.  😄 

I always wanted to be a hippie (just too late for that), so I would have loved Misty Dawn!  Back in the day, I wished my name was Summer.

 

[Drama Llama]

1 hour ago, Melissa Louise said:

I wanted to change my name to Aurora (grade 1) or Violet (grade 2) or Odette (grade 3).

I really wanted to be Primrose for most of elementary school.  

I am over the Prim part, but I campaigned to name a daughter Rosemary and call her Rosie.  In the end, I didn't need a girl's name.  

[Scarlett]

My middle name is from a song around the time I was born.  
 

I know a girl named Luna Dawn. 
 

And last night I heard of two sisters named Winter and August. Winter goes by Winnie.  

[Lady Florida.]

On 10/5/2022 at 10:32 AM, pinball said:

 

Dss is Jason. Dh named him because of Jason and the Argonauts; he had no idea the Jennifer-Jason explosion was about to happen. When ds was in high school he had two close friends named Jason, dated a Jennifer, and had a good friend named Jennifer.

[Splash1]

My mom wanted Danielle and my dad wanted Joanna  Ended up with a name my aunt sent them which I'm convinced came from a toilet paper box,

[Resilient]

I would have been William Warren We__________.  Check out THAT monogram.  🤓

[Grace Hopper]

I was almost named Judy, a popular name for girls in the 60s. 
 

I remember being young and angry that I wasn’t actually named Judy, because I was a big fan of Lost in Space and thought Judy was sooo beautiful! I wanted to be her, and have dreamy Don for a boyfriend. 

[Corraleno]

I was named after my mother's sister, which was the only girl's name they considered. Unfortunately my mother chose to use a shortened, nickname version instead of the full name, and I much prefer the full name (and in fact I used the full version professionally for a while, even though it's not my legal name). If I'd been a boy I would have been William, after my paternal grandfather and uncle.

DS was named after my FIL, which we thought would be really meaningful to him because my BIL only had one child, a daughter, and FIL had no brothers or male cousins and he had mentioned a few times that he was the "last of the line" and there would be no one to carry on the name. Plot twist! We later discovered that DH was the product of an affair and FIL couldn't have cared less that DS was named after him since his "bloodline" died out anyway. If we'd known he didn't care about the name, and had known we'd be moving to the US instead of France, DS would have been named Carter, but FIL's name had the advantage of being similar in English and French, with common equivalents in Spanish and German, and at the time we were planning to stay in Europe. His middle name is the last name of close family friends, who were thrilled about it, so at least we got that one right, lol. DS likes his name although he says he would also have been fine with Carter. Another name DH liked was Jasper, and DS says he's very glad we didn't go with that one. 

We had two possible names picked out for DD, one of which turned out to be closer to the name she was given in the orphanage and that's also the one that DS really wanted, so that's what we went with. DD likes it better than the other option (Mia), although she gets annoyed that Americans usually spell it a nontraditional way. She really dislikes her middle name though — Allegra is not an uncommon name in the UK and was the name of Lord Byron's daughter, and I didn't realize it was the name of an allergy med in the US! She says she will change her last name when she gets married so she can drop her middle name and use her last name as a middle name instead.

[Farrar]

15 minutes ago, Corraleno said:

She really dislikes her middle name though — Allegra is not an uncommon name in the UK and was the name of Lord Byron's daughter, and I didn't realize it was the name of an allergy med in the US! She says she will change her last name when she gets married so she can drop her middle name and use her last name as a middle name instead.

One of my first bosses right out of college had a dd she had named Allegra like right before the allergy medicine had come out. It was clear she was of slightly mixed feelings in retrospect.

Speaking of which... a few years ago, taking my friend's preschooler to a playground for the afternoon, I struck up a conversation with a mom of an Elsa. Oh, I said, how is it now that your kid's name is a Disney princess. She grimaced and then said, "It's even worse. Her sister Anna is in school right now. Obviously that's going to follow them forever." 😂

[kbutton]

On 10/5/2022 at 12:41 PM, 73349 said:

They didn't have anything else picked out for me, and bless their hearts, they thought they were picking out a name that was very recognizable, but not getting much use.

We tried that for both kids. I *think* we succeeded, but for a while it looked like one might take off again. I think it peaked quickly, thankfully.

My parents tried to nickname-proof my name and my brothers but didn't account for rhyming insults or just plain bending a name out of shape to be annoying, lol! A- for effort.

14 hours ago, MissLemon said:

My roommate in college was Kimberly, but was almost named my name. We thought that was a fun coincidence. 

We had neighbors (moved in when I was a teen) who had a boy the same name as my brother, and another boy with what would've been my name if I'd been a boy. Their backup girl name was my name, lol!

1 hour ago, Resilient said:

I would have been William Warren We__________.  Check out THAT monogram.  🤓

Perhaps better than WWF?