Guest blogger Dionne Ford swore she’d never do what her parents did: give all her kids names starting with the same letter.  And then she discovered the up side of coming from a family with a unified name theme.

When I was a kid, I hated my name, not just because it rhymed with peon and my teachers couldn’t pronounce it, but because it made me an amorphous indistinguishable entity from my siblings. We are all Ds; Debra, Diana, Derick, Daniel and Dionne. And if that wasn’t enough, we have matching middle initials – Js for the oldest boy and girl, Ls for the rest of us.

Tongue-tied at almost every meal just asking one of us to pass the salt, my parents often resorted to addressing each of us by D. I grew up thinking my parents couldn’t remember my name.

I swore I’d never play such a cruel joke on my own kids.

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Guest blogger Mary Elizabeth Barr Mann’s family has always called her Bessie, a name she deems fit only for torch singers, great beauties….or cows.

My birth certificate reads “Mary Elizabeth” . Perhaps more importantly in my family, my baptismal certificate reads “Mary Elizabeth”. But, to my father and my brother, I am “Bessie.”

My mother’s name is Mary, and so my father has never called me such. Dr. Freud would approve. And while my extended family makes the distinction by calling me “Mary Beth,” somehow my dad came up with Bessie and thought it was adorable. When my parents discovered that Bessie was easy for my toddler brother to pronounce, it stuck. At least on the nuclear level.

As you might imagine, in my adolescence, I did not like being Bessie. It was not, nor is it yet again, popular. While the U.S. Census pegged Bessie as the 13th most popular girls’ name in 1880, it plummeted out of the top 100 by 1930 and nosedived from the top 1000 by 1970.

Worse yet for my teenage years, Bessie is neither sleek, nor sexy. It is not stylish. Not a single model in Seventeen magazine ever had that name. And, though somewhere in a corner of Park Slope there may be an urban hipster mother plotting to bring back the name is a burst of ugly-chic, to this day Bessie remains shunned.

The nickname didn’t bother me as a very young child. Heck, I was surrounded by relatives with equally unattractive, ragged-old-laundry-hanging-in-the-back-alley names—like Reenie (for Irene) and Mossie (for Martha). But by my teenage years, I really, really wanted my dad and my brother—and by now my younger sisters who had gotten in on the act—to quit it. The worst was when my brother’s friends would tease me about the name: “Bessie the cow.” “Old Bess, my gun.” (And this from a kid with a big schnoz whose surname was Finnochio. Sheesh.)

Sure, there was Bessie Smith. And Bess Myerson—the first Jewish Miss America. But that was IT. Unless you were belting out the blues with a voice full of sorrow and steel, or you were transcendentally beautiful, this was not a good name. With my reedy soprano, eyeglasses and frizzy hair, I was none of these things (although I have since graduated to contact lenses!).

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It’s no longer just foreign royals who are using multiple middle names for their babies.  More and more parents–both celebrity and civilian– are doubling or even tripling up, seeing it as an opportunity to widen their naming options, both in terms of honoring a namesake, or just for the sheer pleasure of choosing and bestowing an extra name or two.

One appealing possibility is that of honoring both maternal or paternal grandparents, as Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin did using all fourof their parents’ names for their children– Apple Blythe Alison and Moses Bruce Anthony. It’s also an opportunity for a Mom to use her maiden name –a venerable tradition–along with  another, hand-picked one.  This is among the positive points brought up by posters on our message boards—the fact that it allows you to use one of your favorite names along with either your maiden name or that of some other family member you might want to honor.

There are some minor downsides including possible future bureaucratic snafus down the road. Smitty wrote in a while back to say that she works in the medical field and that “When women marry and hyphenate their names or keep their maiden and middle names and add their married names, the computer system we have can freak out.” –and forms like Social Security limit you to one middle only,  in effect depriving a person of recording her full name (so you might want to consider the order of the middle names quite carefully.)    (more…)

Appellation Mountain’s Abby Sandel, one of nameberry’s favorite guest bloggers, writes about what names mean beyond what the books say they mean.

When I refer to the secret meaning of names, I’m not talking about kaballah.  I’m not even talking about names like Nevaeh, where the so-called secret meaning is quite clear.

Instead, I’m intrigued by the difference between the meanings given by baby books and the reasons our parents pick our names.

Head to most baby name websites, or flip open your favorite book to Kayla.  Or Kaylee.  Or Kaitlyn.  Odds are that the guides will offer a one-word meaning: pure.  They might also note that Kayla, Kaylee, Kaitlyn and kin are considered variants of Katherine.  As well as Kathryn, Cathryn, Katrina, Katinka, Caylee … the entry could fill a page.

Name aficionados will pause and reflect that Katherine’s meaning is debated.  It is likely that Katherine’s origins are wrapped up with the goddess Hecate, she of witches and demons.  At some point the name was altered to more closely resemble the Greek katharos, which does mean pure.

But if your mother loved the soap opera Days of Our Lives in the 1980s, she probably had the popular character in mind when she planned to call her firstborn daughter Kayla.

Or maybe your father’s mother was called Kay, and Kayla seemed like a fitting way to honor grandma.

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Wherever Ewe Go, There Ewe Are is the wonderful blog of today’s guest blogger formally known as “Ewe,” an American living in the United Kingdom with her Scottish husband.  She’s the mom of two sons, ages four and two, and is expecting a daughter, known for now as Lambchop.

I always thought I’d know exactly what I would name my daughter, but now that I’m actually having one, I’m seriously waffling. There are soooo many lovely girl names out there. And as a result, some of my ’sure thing’ name combination options aren’t looking so ’sure thing’ anymore. In fact, a whole slew of girls names that I have always thought I would give ultra-serious consideration to were almost immediately off the table for a whole variety of reasons.

Here, girls’ names I love and admire….but WON’T be using.

1. FREYA. I adore the name Freya. In fact, back when I was pregnant with Boo, before I knew Boo was a “he”, Freya was at the top of my list for a wee girl. It’s a gorgeous name that doesn’t even crack the top 1000 list in the U.S., which is a head-scratcher for me because it’s a chronic top 20 name in England and Scotland. But, sadly, that’s why we took it off our list now that we’re actually having a girl; it’s waaaay too popular here. I see so many little Freyas everywhere I go here. If we lived in the states, this would be our likely choice. But we don’t, so it’s out.

2. MALIA. Another long, long-time favorite name. One of my sister’s best friends growing up was named Malia; and I fell even more in love with it during my six years in Hawaii. It’s just so pretty when it rolls off the tongue. But then we elected a new President last year, and guess what? His oldest girl’s name is Malia, which means it’s going to go straight up the popularity charts. Plus, it’s Hawaiian, and my husband isn’t quite as keen on the idea.

3. TRIONA. My love of Celtic and Irish music led me to this name years ago. It’s a shortened version of Catriona or Caitriona. But my husband pointed out that, technically, I was pronouncing it wrong (tree-oh-nah) when it should be pronounced like ‘trina’. And he was only willing to consider the full version of Catriona, which faces the same pronuncation issues, which I’m not as keen on. Plus, we already have an Auntie Trina, which violates one of my existing naming rules. (Not to mention the fact that a good friend made fun of it years ago, but I forgive her. She had a good point. heh heh)

4. AUDREY. Audrey is just a lovely, lovely name, made famous by the even lovelier Ms Hepburn. But it’s been screaming up the charts in the U.S. the past few years, and is clearly headed for the top 20 very soon. An old-fashioned name that is clearly coming back around, and rightfully so. But its popularity means it’s not for us.

5. LEILANI. Another gorgeous Hawaiian name that I’ve always admired; another ‘no’ from my husband.

6. LORELEI. Ditto the Hawaiian gorgeousness. And made even more mainstream in popularity by the quirky television series The Gilmore Girls. And now envision the ‘too Hawaiian’ name being vetoed by my husband with the addition of an eye-roll. Sigh.

7. ADELE. Another lovely, old-fashioned name that I think deserves to make a comeback. But I also can’t quite imagine giving it to a baby because it still sounds like an “older” name. I suspect that’s the reason it still hasn’t re-entered the top 1000 names in the U.S. We’d have to use a nickname, like Ada (and we have one of those in the family already, so ‘no’) or Addie while Lambchop was little. And, to be honest, I’m not huge on nicknames, so it’s an unlikely choice for us.

8. VIOLETA. Pronounced vee-oh-letta, I think this is a very pretty, sweet name for a girl. A lovely flower name, the prettier version of Violet. But one of Ramekin’s best friends on our street is named Violeta, so no go.

9. ANNIKA. On paper, and on the tongue, the name fits all of our potential naming criteria. It’s a lovely Scandinavian name (Swedish, though, not Norwegian), which would probably delight my Norwegian MIL. But after much –and I mean much– consideration while I seriously considered it, I just don’t think it will work with our childrens’ last names. There’s just something not quite right about it for us…. so it was with regret I took it out of serious contention. (I suppose it could make a comeback, though…you never know.)

10a and 10b. AILSA and ISLA. Both names are beautiful, traditional Scottish girl names that my Scotland-born husband really likes. But Isla is incredibly popular right now, so I’m not interested in using it. And, while Ailsa is lovely, the truth is, it sounds foreign coming off my tongue. I struggle to pronounce it properly, and I want a name I can easily pronounce for my own daughter. When I say Ailsa, it sounds more like Elsa, an almost equally lovely Scandinavian name, and, incidentally, the name of one of my husband’s (now deceased) Norwegian Aunts. But we know a four-month old Elsa. And I don’t like the look of it as much as Ailsa. So it lingers on the discarded names list.

11. SERENA. Pretty, but ruined by the existence of the teeny bopper television show Gossip Girl. I can only imagine how many younger moms-to-be will be using this name for their own daughters in the coming years.

12. JOELLE. Getting really tired of my husband’s eye rolls, which is what I got when I suggested it. And a reminder that we’re not French.

13. ARLETTE. My husband again reminds me that we’re not French, the party-pooper.

Bonus round: A few additional lovely, old-fashioned girly names we won’t be using because they’re just too darn popular over here, all in the top 20: HANNAH; CHARLOTTE; OLIVIA; LILY

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We’d like to offer our CONGRATULATIONS on the arrival of three beautiful (and beautifully named) baby girls born to members of the extended Nameberry family:

ESME JULIETTE, daughter of our friend Hilary at the wonderful pregnancy site thecradle.com

EULALIE, daughter of one of favorite bloggers (and nameberry guest bloggers), Elisabeth, of youcantcallitit, where you can find her amusing description of  how she arrived at the name, and….

VIOLET KATHERINE, daughter of nameberry boards regular Kristen, who offered her thanks to all of you, writing  “Your book, the website and the advice of the wonderful ladies who are regulars on your forums led me to choose a name that had meaning for me and my family (instead of a name that I simply thought sounded cool) .”