Category: Baby Name News
By Abby Sandel, Appellation Mountain
From Grammy Award-winning rapper Lil’ Kim to a previously anonymous mom in Alaska, some parents are thinking big when it comes to baby names.
Not every parent, of course. Casual choices like Charlie and Molly, Mia and Jack have been popular in recent years. And I’ve always thought that George Alexander Louis was a pretty low-key pick for a future king.
But whether the name is an outlandish borrowing from the dictionary or one worn by an accomplished historical figure, it’s worth asking: When is a name too much to live up to?
The World Cup has officially started in Brazil, which means the majority of the world will spend the next month glued to their TV screens, filled with patriotic pride- even in countries like the US, where soccer is slowly building a fan base. I highly suggest everyone watch because it’s a fairly simple sport to understand, fun to watch and the players, well, they aren’t terrible to look at. The favorites to win, in case you were wondering, are Germany and host country Brazil.
World Cup promotion aside, football/soccer is the world’s sport and with 32 countries from all corners of the earth involved in the finals, so interesting names are just waiting to be discovered. The full rosters, with both first and surnames included can be found on Fifa’s website, but some of the best are listed below. And you’ll find that some of the most popular naming trends in the U.S. are reflected on the rosters of several countries: Italian variations of our Top 100, Roman names, place names, and other trends can all be found on footballers.
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by CaraMichelle
Here is the latest edition of CaraMichelle’s invaluable, comprehensive, monthly list of new starbabies, allowing us to get a broad picture of what’s new in the celebrisphere– the A-listers and beyond. (Thanks as always, Cara!)
By Abby Sandel, Appellation Mountain
Here’s something I overheard recently:
Olivia’s a nice name, but Aria? Who names a kid after Game of Thrones?
There’s something to that statement, isn’t there? Olivia feels like a vintage revival, a literary choice thanks to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and a wildly popular name for over a decade. Aria is a newcomer, a noun name that leapt from obscurity to prominence thanks to more than one pop culture reference. They’re very different names.
Yet on sound alone, Aria and Olivia are similar. Reverse the histories – make Aria the Shakespearean choice and Olivia the twenty-first century television darling – and it is easy to imagine the statement reversed, too. After all, five of the current US Top 20 girls’ names end with -ia.
Nouveau or traditional, popular or obscure, our favorite names tend to share sounds.
