What could be a greater gift to bestow on your daughter than a name with a heroic namesake, someone with an inspiring story to add a layer of pride to your little girl’s  feelings about her name–and give her great material for a school report?

The following is a list of mostly American women of great courage, perseverence and accomplishment—many of whom broke barriers for women– that could fill this bill.  And of course, this being nameberry, the name’s the thing, so apologies to all the equally distinguished Marys, Elizabeths, Sarahs and Anns who haven’t been included: the following  ladies were picked (almost) as much for their interesting names as for their  achievements.

ABIGAIL Adams – The first First Lady to occupy the White House and an  ntellectually equal partner of her husband, President John Adams.

ADA LOVELACE – daughter of the poet Byron whose work in mathematics was (probably) a precursor of the modern computer.

AMELIA Earhart — the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. (more…)

Maybe they didn’t have voices then, but lots of the silent screen stars did have intriguingly exotic looks and equally exotic names–even if many of them were invented by studio publicists.  Theda Bara, for example, the quintessential vamp, was not the Egyptian-born daughter of a French actress and an Italian sculptor whose name was an anagram of Arab Death, as the PR people proclaimed to the public, but was actually Cincinnati-born Theodosia Goodman, daughter of a Jewish tailor. Likewise,  Nita Naldi’s real last name was Dooley, Olga Petrova was born Muriel Hardy and Alla Nazimova’s birth name was Miriam Leventon.

But real or concocted, these names–primarily short, with two-syllables and heavy on the vowels–still retain vestiges of that sultry  1900’s-1920’s glamour, and  could have  some vintage appeal today:

ALLA

ASTA

GRETA

ISA

JETTA

LEDA

LEILA

LINA

LITA

LOLA

LYA

LYDA

NEVA

NITA

OLGA

ORA

ORMI

POLA

RIA

THEDA

TORA

VALLA

VILMA

VOLA

ZENA (more…)

Today being Canada Day–which is roughly equivalent to the US Independence Day–it seems like a good opportunity to browse through the bilingual Canadian name bank and see what we can find–actually,  more unusual–even exotic– names than you might expect. For instance, in the French colonies known as Acadia, there are such boys’ names as:

ALPHE

CALIXTE

ELZEAR

EMELIEN

LEONIDE

(more…)

It’s Pop’s turn!  For Mother’s Day we took a look at some of the more interesting names of the mothers of distinguished people, and now we do the same for the paternal parent.  Once more,  it turns out that an unusual number of past (and a few present) notables have had Dads with interesting, and sometimes surprising, names.  Here are some examples to prove the point:

ABRAHAM –Bob Dylan

ALFRED (called Freddie) — John Lennon

ALLAN — Herman Melville

ALLESSANDRO — Maria Montessori

ANDREJ — Andy Warhol

ARCHULUS — Truman Capote

AUGUSTINE –  George Washington

BAILEY –  Ray Charles, Maya Angelou

BELMONT — Humphrey Bogart

CASSIUS –  Mohammed Ali

CLARENCE –  Ernest Hemingway, Billie Holiday

CLYDE  –  John Wayne

CORNELIUS –  Tennessee Williams

DELBERT  — Gene Autry

DOMENICO –  Christopher Columbus

ELIAS –  Walt Disney, Cary Grant

EMILE –  Henri Matisse

FERNANDO  — Luciano Pavarotti

FLOYD — Tina Turner

FRANCIS  –  Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Zappa, Georgia O’Keeffe (his middle name Calyxtus)

GARRETT –  Edward Hopper

GERRIT –  Rembrandt van Rijn

GUSTAV — Arnold Schwarzenegger

HOMER –  Johnny Carson

ISTVAN  — Bela Lugosi

JAKOB  –  Sigmund Freud, Johannes Brahms

JONAS –  Ava Gardner

JOSIAH –  Benjamin Franklin

JUDAH  –  Isaac Asimov

JUSTUS  –  Ingrid Bergman (shown)

KNUD  –  Henrik Ibsen

LEO –  Jack Kerouac

LESLIE  –  Virginia Woolf

LUDOVICO — Michelangelo

MORRIS –  George Gershwin

MOSES  — Milton Berle

MURRY –  William Faulkner

NEWELL  –  Andrew Wyeth

NICCOLO  –  Marco Polo

PAVEL –  Anton Chekhov

SOL –  J. D. Salinger

SQUIRE –  Daniel Boone

SYLVIO –  Madonna

THEODOUS  –  Vincent Van Gogh

VERNON  –  Elvis Presley

WINTON  –  James Dean

Last time many of you shared the names of your own wonderful parents–and we hope you’ll do so again!

There are some celebrity kids’ names that are immediately embraced by other parents and become instant hits. Take Kingston, for example, the name chosen for personal reasons relating to the city in Jamaica by Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale: it had all the ingredients to make it a success– accessibility, likeability, a strong, familiar sound with regal overtones, plus extremely high-profile parents.

Another name with similar qualities is Maddox, the first son of Angelina Jolie, which first entered the popularity lists in 2003 and has been steadily climbing ever since. A few recent names—Honor (Warren), Clementine (Hawkes), Seraphina (Affleck), and Harlow (Madden) spring to mind—were direct hits, and seem sure to spread.

On the other side of the coin are those that were just as instantly rejected as too weird for everyday consumption: the Ikhyds, Banjos, Bandits, Pumas, Pirates and Peanuts.

Some names that were greeted at first as too audacious have now become accepted. Romeo, second son of Victoria and David Beckham, had been considered too melodramatically Shakespearean until it became associated with a cute blonde crew cut and a British accent. The name of Romeo’s brother Brooklyn also produced a few guffaws when it was announced—but then other parents started to separate the two syllables into Brook and Lyn, gradually cancelling out the New-York-accented borough association and transforming it into a pretty name for a girl: now Brooklyn ranks in the Top 50 of girls’ names. That other New York borough name, Bronx, however, got an instant thumbs down.

Of course a lot of it is about exposure. The fabulous name of the kid of some C-list actress who has never once been seen in the pages of People or viewed on Access Hollywood probably isn’t gonna make it.

On the other hand, names that are paraded before the public daily, like Kelly Ripa’s Lola and Joaquin can’t help but be noticed and emulated. Teri Hatcher named her daughter Emerson in 1997, but it wasn’t until Hatcher hit it big with Desperate Housewives that the name really took off—as has her co-star Marcia Cross’s much-photographed twin’s Eden.

So which names have definitely been given a celebritized bounce? The leader of the pack is—hands down—Ava, used by no fewer than a dozen stars, most notably Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Philippe in 1999, and which is now the fifth most popular name in America.

Some others that have been boosted by a celebrity connection are:

AVERY for girls

BECKETT

CRUZ

EDEN

EMERSON

FINLEY for girls

HARPER for girls

JADEN

JOAQUIN

KINGSTON

LOLA

MADDOX

MILO

PAX

ROMEO

RYDER

SHILOH

VIOLET

ZAHARA

There ‘s also a more recent contingent of starbaby names that seem to have the potential for becoming more widely accepted, including:

ALICE

ANNISTON

ASHBY

BECKETT

CLEMENTINE

DASHIELL

HARLOW

HONOR

KENZO

MAGNUS

MATILDA

ROMY

TRUE

VIVIENNE