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…)

One of the most fun things about running nameberry, as opposed to being a visitor, is that you get to peer behind the scenes and see which names people are actually searching for.  Some of the most visited names on nameberry are ones you’d expect: Ava and Aidan, Lucy and Logan.  And then there are the stylish nameberry favorites as detailed in a recent blog: Beatrix, Penelope, Atticus.

But a bit further down on the list, we’re noticing less expected names that our visitors seem to be inordinately curious about.  These are the choices that are not on any popularity list – not even a sophisticated, fashion-forward one like nameberry’s – yet are attracting more than their share of attention.

Our conclusion?  These are names to watch.  It may be only the more adventurous baby namers who are actually using them at the moment, but we predict that in a decade, most will feel more familiar – perhaps way more familiar – than they do now.

These names of the future include:

Girls

ANAIS

ANASTASIA

ANNABEL

ANWEN

ARDEN

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When I lived in London in the 90s, I was gobsmacked (astonished in British) by how different the baby names were there. It wasn’t like they used names Americans had never heard of – exotic ones like Pema or invented ones like Puma – but that they used some of the familiar English names far more often than did parents in the U.S.

Clementine and Hugo, for instance, were the most fashionable names of that day in the U.K., names I’d rarely heard stateside. Clementine was pronounced with an –een ending, which removed it from the “Oh My Darling” association – not that many Brits carried that association.

Some of the names popular in Britain and not in the U.S. are similarly free of connections that may damn them in America: Jemima, say, and Archie. Others are old Celtic or Cornish or Welsh names that never crossed the ocean, such as Tamsin and Callum.

And then there are those names on this list that are classics or short forms heard in America, but not as fashionably – I’m thinking of Forence, for example, and Freddie, Lucy (yes, still) and Louis.

Based on another entertaining tour through the London Telegraph birth announcements from the past few months, here are some names that are stylish in the U.K. right now.

Girls

ALICE
CECILY
CHARIS or CARYS
CRESSIDA
DARCY or DARCEY
DAVINA
EDIE
ELIZA
FLORA
FLORENCE
FREYA
GENEVIEVE
GEORGIANA or GEORGINA
IMOGEN
JEMIMA
LUCY
MAISIE
NATASHA
OCTAVIA

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When the mother of all hipster mommy bloggers, Heather Armstrong aka Dooce, named her second daughter Marlo, all I could think was…..Marlo? Really?  You’d have to work hard to find a less hipsterish name, and Dooce herself has said she was inspired to choose the name by its original bearer, That Girl actress and Free to Be You and Me author Marlo Thomas, not exactly a hipster icon.

So I was thinking about how true hipsters would by definition search for names that were not pegged as hipster, when I came across a nameberry forum launched by the ever-brilliant Susan Chesney, called Outhip the Hipsters.

“What names are even more edgy and nerdy-cool than the Hipster List?,” Susan writes in the introduction to her thread.  Rule #1, says Susan: The names on the Outhip the Hipsters list cannot be on the Hipsters list or be enthusiastically endorsed on Nameberry.

Over the next 50 posts, dozens of the nameberry resident geniuses added their own entries to the Outhip the Hipsters list.  I’ve reclassified many of the name suggestions below, plus added some of my own.

Here, names that may Outhip the Hipsters:

RISING HIPSTER NAMES

The choices below are rising quickly through the hipster ranks and may soon be so hip they’re not hip anymore.

girls

Agatha

Dorothy

Freya

Fuchsia

Gwen

Louise

Magdalene

Mildred

Muriel

Pauline

Ramona

Roxanne

Ruth

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It’s a curious thing that, even when people prefer quirky or unusual names, they often prefer the same quirky or unusual names. Why is Clementine such a darling, for instance, while brother name Clement languishes? Why are Nora, Cora, and even Florence hot, while the equally lovely Flora is ignored?

In the nameberry spirit of promoting great unusual, underrated, unappreciated names, we bring you the latest in a series of names nobody’s using…..but should be.

CAIO – Variation of an ancient Latin name that means “rejoice”, Caio – pronounced not kay-oh or chow but kye-oh – takes the trendy Kai one step further. Contemporary artist Caio Fonseca is a noted bearer.

CALANDRA – One of the Cal- family of Greek girls’ names popularized by Calista Flockhart, Calandra means “lark” and has a formal, elegant feel.

COLETTE – The new movie Cheri with Michelle Pfeiffer may at least bring this name of the scandalous French writer back into contemporary consciousness. Out of the Top 1000 for more than two decades, Colette is derived from Nicholas.

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