For the past couple of years, Charlotte has been at or near the top of the list of Berry favorites, and it’s not hard to see why.  It’s a name at the very center of the Sweet Spot of names with a ton of great attributes and references—literary, historic, and royal.  She’s demure, yet solid and strong, classic but not stuffy, British with the slightest trace of a French accent–one of the very best classic girls’ names.

She has so much going for her that we thought that she deserved a whole blog to herself.

History

Like her cousin Caroline, Charlotte is a feminine form of Charles, but arrived there in a roundabout way.  Charlotte is actually the English and French version of the Italian Carlotta, itself a feminine version of Carlo, the Italian Charles, and has been in English-speaking use since the seventeenth century.  In the fifteenth century, Carlotta of Savoy married King Louis XI of France, where her name became Gallicized as Charlotte, a form which then emigrated to England during the next century.

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The first real Broadway musical was a five-and-a-half-hour 1866 curiosity called The Black Crook, featuring characters named Rodolphe, Stalacta, Barbara and Amina.

Since that time, of course, there have been countless more shows with zillions of  names of characters belting it out on the Great White Way, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous.  There are so many of the former that it’s been hard to narrow it down to a dozen or so Nameberry Faves, but here are our final picks:

Adelaide—In Guys & Dolls, Adelaide is an endearing Hot Boxclub dancer with a perpetual psychosomatic cold due to the frustrations of a 14-year engagement.  Not surprisingly, Aussie Rachel Griffiths chose this rapidly climbing Australian place name for her daughter; Katherine Heigl spelled it Adalaide.

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When we think of names related to the moon our first thoughts would probably be Luna, or the Zappa-esque Moon, or one of the ancient goddesses of the moon—Phoebe, Artemis, Diana, or Selene.

But what about the names of actual moons, of some of the many satellites rotating around the planets?  Luckily for us namebodies, many of their names were taken from ancient Greek mythological figures (several after lovers of Zeus)–particularly those around Jupiter and Saturn– while the names of Uranus’s twenty-seven moons have a decidedly Shakespearean bent.

Here, the Nameberry Picks of the best lunar names:

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Scandinavian names have been slow to enter the American stockpot of names.  Maybe it’s because they’re not as romantic as the Italians, as genial as the Irish, as energetic as the Russians, or as instantly chic as the French.

But there are a lot of great, neglected Swedish, Norwegian and Danish names to be discovered, and those of internationally known Scandinavian celebrities have provided a pathway in.  Here are the names of some such notables, both past and present, which are both appealing and accessible– and definitely worth considering.

Astrid—the prolific Swedish author Astrid Lindgren is best known as the creator of Pippi Longstocking.  Her royal Scandinavian name has been neglected here in favor of the more familiar Ingrid, but is just as attractive.

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