The minute I saw that the leading character in the new sitcom Life Unexpected was a young girl named Lux, a bell went off.  Does this mean that there will be a slew of baby Luxes (Luxi?)?  Will Lux be the new Lexi?  Or won’t it have any effect at all in this era of diminished network TV viewing?

We certainly know that some TV characters’ names of the past have had an impact, from Samantha on Bewitched to Alexis on Dynasty to Brandon and Dylan on the old Beverly Hill 90210 to Xander on Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Aidan on Sex and the City right up to the female Addison on Grey’s Anatomy.

So what about the current line-up?  Though some of these are not strictly speaking new names, here are the somewhat out of the mainstream character names of current (and a few about to launch) shows.  Think any of them will make an impression on baby namers?

GIRLS

ADALEEN—Big Love

ADRIANNA, nn ADE—90210

AMITA—NUMB3RS

ARIZONA—Grey’s Anatomy

BREE- Desperate Housewives

BRITTA—Community

CERIE—30 Rock

DOROTA—The Gossip Girls

FIA—Miami Medical (upcoming)

FRANKIE—The Middle

JULES—Cougar Town

JULIET—Lost

HENRIETTA/”HETTY”—NCIS: Los Angeles

KALINDA—The Good Wife

KENSI—NCIS: Los Angeles

LUX—Life Unexpected

MARGENE—Big Love

MARISOL—Miami Medical (upcoming)

MERCEDES—Glee

NAEVIA—Sparticus: Blood & Sand

NICOLETTE—Big Love

RILEY—Melrose Place

SILVER (her last name used as first) 90210

SLOAN–Entourage

SURA—Spartacus: Blood & Sand

TANCY—Big Love

WILHELMINA—Ugly Betty

ZOEY–Nurse Jackie

BOYS

ANDO—Heroes

ARI–Entourage

ARLO—24

ASHUR—Spartacus: Blood & Sand

AXL—The Middle

BAZE, nn for Nate Bazile—Life Unexpected

BOONE—Lost

CASTIEL—Supernatural

CREED—The Office (the real first name of the actor who plays him)

CROSBY—Parenthood

DANOI—Treme—upcoming

DEXTER–Dexter

DIXON–90210

FINN—Glee

FITCH—Nurse Jackie

FRITZ—The Closer

GREYSON—Cougar Town

HIRO—Heroes

HUGO/”HURLEY”—Lost

IGNACIO—Ugly Betty

KIMBALL-The Mentalist

MILES—Lost

ORSON—Desperate Housewives

PIERCE—Community

ROWDY—The Deep End

RUFUS—Gossip Girls

THATCHER—Grey’s Anatomy

THOR—Nurse Jackie

ZEEK—Parenthood

With 2009 name fads, from Marley to Miley, safely behind us, what do we see as the hottest trends in baby names for the year ahead  Here, nameberry’s top 15 predictions for 2010 baby names:

BIGGEST BIG PICTURE TREND: ECONOMICAL NAMES

In this era of tighter budgets and darker outlooks, 2010 baby names will be getting both shorter and more light-hearted.  We see a trend toward nickname names ahead.  For boys, these are economical one-syllable names: Bob, Joe, Gus, Hal, Hank, Max,.  Such short forms – in every sense of the phrase are stylish and getting more so in Europe, with Jack the number one name in England, Tom tops in France, Bas and Sem popular in the Netherlands.

For girls, the nickname trend adds an “ie” onto the end of every name: Gracie, Ellie, Evie, Maisie, Josie.  Trendlet: boys’ nicknames – Lou, Charlie, Sam, Frankie – for girls.

NEWEST RETRO TREND

We predict the revival of serious, no-frills names that haven’t been considered for babies in several generations: Adele, Alice, Dorothy, Edith, Evelyn, Florence, Lenore, Louise, and Marion for girls; Arthur, Frank, Harold, Harvey, Martin, Raymond, Victor, Vincent, Walter, Warren for boys.  Having trouble imagining such sober names on cute little kids?  We said the same thing about Moses and Matilda a handful of years ago.

(more…)

The Golden Globe nominations are out and the Oscar hopefuls will soon follow, but somehow or other they’ve neglected to even consider a key category: the most interesting, innovative character names of 2009.

So we’ve put together a list of possible nominees.  Of course, since there were more than 700 movies released (or about to be) this year, we couldn’t get to see every cast list of every native and foreign film, but we did look at most of the major releases.  In the list below, you’ll find some quirky sci-fi choices and exotic options from other cultures.  Some of the names will be familiar from previous Harry Potter and Twilight and Star Trek franchises, so we tread lightly there.  And there’s the usual caveat–we make no moral judgments, so both good guys and bad guys, saints and sinners are included.

GIRLS

AGNESS –  It’s Complicated

AUTUMN –  (500) Days of Summer

BLISS –  Whip It

CLARISSA The Lovely Bones

COCO –  Coco Before Chanel

CORALINE –  Coraline

CORBI –  Whip It

BELLATRIX –  Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

ÉLOÏSE  –  Summer Hours

EMILIENNE –  Coco Before Chanel (more…)

This blog is adapted from our most recent book, Beyond Ava & Aiden: The Enlightened Guide to Naming Your Baby

When people look for baby names online, they often put in a search for “unique names.” Some of them are trying to find names that are unusual and distinctive, but some really do want to give their child a name that’s truly one-of-a-kind, something that nobody else has.

A recent newspaper story claimed that one of the reasons for this is because modern parents want their child to be “Googleable,” to have a name that’s different enough that it will pop out online. And some parents say they won’t settle on a name until they find out whether its url is available.

Of course, as soon as you give your child a “unique” name, it all but guarantees it won’t be unique anymore since someone will almost inevitably poach it. We were tickled to find, for instance, that someone posted on our website bulletin board that she’d named her son Knox, a name that wasn’t in our or any other baby-naming book –  months before Angelina and Brad chose it for their newborn son, launching it on the track to widespread use.

When we asked visitors to our website to tell us what they’d named their babies, we never expected their answers to provide such a trove of highly unusual – yes, even unique – names. Some of these turn gender on its ear, some twist spellings in different ways, some reintroduce ancient or ethnic names or transform place names or surnames, and some are conjured from parents’ fertile brains.

Now here is where you would ordinarily expect to find a long list of distinctive, never-heard-before names.  But that would be against the spirit of this style.  So you’ll just have to find–or create–one of your own.

For more of our ideas on unusual names, check out Beyond Ava & Aiden: The Enlightened Guide to Naming Your Baby

For several years now, word names have been singled out as being at the extreme edge of cool—we may have been guilty of pushing that edge ourselves at times.  But I’m starting to wonder if it’s time to pull back a little, and put the brakes on.  Celebrities have tried to outdo each other to sometimes eye-rolling effect in the effort to find a ‘unique’, attention-grabbing word name : I’m not naming names but I might mention a few words like zeppelin and pirate and peanut.

Of course there are word names and there are word names and probably the most acceptable and appealing are the centuries-old Virtue names created by the early and most zealous Pilgrims to display their righteous religiosity.  Though  such excessive male phrase-names as Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith and Fly-fornication are long gone, the simpler girl virtue names have not only survived but some are now downright trendy: Grace, Hope, Faith, and, more recently, Felicity, True and Honor.

Other worthy examples include:

AMITY

CHARITY

CLARITY

COMFORT

MERCY (more…)