Guest blogger Elizabeth Lindsay, aka nameberry’s very own Olivekit, was wracked with indecision over what to name her third baby girl — a dilemma followed closely by all her friends on nameberry’s message boards.  The final name choice surprised everyone, even Olivekit herself.

Baby Ooh La La (what my two-and-a-half-year-old calls her little sister), entered the world on July 23^rd, after a quick and almost painless delivery (love the epidural).  My beautiful baby girl debuted with an ear piercing scream that made the doctor laugh and say that Baby Ooh La La was the loudest baby that she had ever delivered.  She gets that from my husband.

After cleaning her up and weighing her, they handed her back to me.  We looked her over and studied her features, she looked a lot like her big sisters Olive and Kit, but with more hair.  She was perfect.

We oohed and awed over her, took a lot of pictures, and then one of the delivery nurses asked, “What’s her name?”

Crap. What followed were endless conversations about what she would not be named.

Me:  How about Phoebe, nickname Bea?

Hubby: Don’t like Phoebe.

Me:  Why not?

Hubby:  It sounds like a mean girl’s name.

Me:  What?!

(After pushing, I found out that he asked out a Phoebe once on a date in Junior High and she said no. Emphatically. Phoebe was out.)

We tried (trust me) to come up with a name. I read every book, made lists, got opinions from the wonderful ladies of Nameberry, and my loving but opinionated husband found fault with every name I came up with.  Plus, having two daughters named Olive and Kit, the pressure was on to find a name that went perfectly with theirs. Not an easy task.

I envy people who can just pick a name for their baby and that’s that.  When I was pregnant with Olive, we had a couple over for dinner and the topic of baby names came up.  Even though they weren’t expecting yet, after ruling out a couple of names, they agreed on William for a boy.    A five minute conversation and sure enough, years later, they welcomed baby William Archer.  It was never that easy for us.

Olive was going to be Courtney or Kendall until I had a dream that I was calling her by a different name and she looked at me and said, “My name is Olive, Mommy.”  I woke up and told my husband, who loved the name.  I didn’t.  I wasn’t going to name my daughter Olive.  The only Olive I had ever heard of was Olive Oyl and I don’t even like olives.   But my husband started calling her Olive toward the end of my pregnancy and when she born, Courtney Olive she became.

At my ultrasound for my second pregnancy, the baby had her back turned to us so the gender was going to be a delivery surprise.  Since I didn’t want to call him or her “it” for the next five months, we nicknamed the baby Kit because that worked for a girl or a boy. I was positive that I was having a boy.  The pregnancy was so much different than with Ollie’s and sadly, I didn’t dream up for a name for this baby, but we had a few names picked out for him.

“It’s a girl!”, the doctor proudly announced. My husband looked at me confused for a second, before we laughed and welcomed our second baby girl into our lives.  But what on Earth were we going to name her? (more…)

Novelist Christina Baker Kline, whose wonderful new book Bird in Hand comes out this week, writes about how even someone who names fictional people for a living can make mistakes when naming real live babies.  Like when she named her three sons: Eli, his brother William, and his other brother William.

You’d think that someone who spends her days creating and naming characters might have gotten the hang of it by the time she had to name some actual humans.  That’s what I thought, at least.  In fact, I was rather smug about it.  A novelist spends a lot of time, over the course of writing 300 pages, with the characters she names, so you learn to choose carefully.

Names can instantly reveal a person’s class, age, social standing, and even race. They have positive and negative connotations. And the wrong name can be disastrous. For example, a friend of mine named Brandy is an award-winning journalist who has had to battle people’s preconceptions all her life about her name.  I would never do that to a character!

So why did I do it to my kids?

(I‘m charitably saying “I,” but for the record my husband was an equal and willing partner in this.)

We named our firstborn William Hayden Baker Kline (yes, four names – bear with me), after my father, William Baker, and a whole lot of Hadens — we added the “y” — in my husband’s family tree. We signed the birth certificate, sent out printed announcements, and received everything from picture frames to baby rattles to blankets with “William Hayden” and his birthdate inscribed.

But over the next few weeks, we began to second-guess.  This child was round and jolly, with curly red hair: a baby leprechaun.  The princely name of William just didn’t fit.  But Hayden – yes!  He was definitely a Hayden, a hobbity child of the heather-grown hills.  It was the perfect name for him, and, we thought, relatively undiscovered.

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Our guest blogger Marion Roach first wrote about her sister Margaret’s horse-inspired name on her blog She Said, She Said, part of the sisters’ joint site, The Sister Project.  Margaret Roach, the former editor of “Martha Stewart Living”, also runs the site A Way To Garden.

My family frequently names those we love for sports idols. For instance, among the dozen cats and dogs who have come and gone in my life there was Saratoga Roach, a terrier of a beagle, named for the late-summer racetrack in upstate New York, and Cleveland, a hapless chocolate lab, named for the Browns.

Then there is my sister, Margaret, named for the 1954 winner of the Belmont Stakes.

At one point in his life our father was a turf reporter, spending his winters at Hialeah, his summers in Saratoga and the time between at the racetracks in the East. Amid the crowd he covered, one of the great pastimes was naming thoroughbreds. It’s an art—no name can be more than 18 characters, including punctuation and spaces—as well as a science: Names frequently reflect breeding, sometimes with great flourish. For instance, the year before my sister was born, the great horse of 1953 was a colt whose father was Polynesian and mother was named Geisha. Their champion offspring was crowned Native Dancer. It’s a great tradition.

And one that continued into my family. My father had a horse named for him—it was called Sportseditor. I have a sailboat named Ruffian, for the magnificent dark filly who didn’t know the meaning of the word quit, until she broke down at the mile marker in a match race against Foolish Pleasure in 1975.

But all this really started in January 1954, when my father and mother, on their way to Hialeah, stopped off to see Max Hirsch, the great horse trainer, at his winter quarters in South Carolina.

In due course it was revealed that there was an offspring on the way in our household.

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The recent spate of celebrities having twins (they’re not really just like us, are they?) got me thinking about twin names.  Although the Social Security list of most popular twin names would have you think differently, cutesy pairs like Merry and Joy or Tim and Tom are out.  So how can you find twin names that have a strong unifying element yet are distinct from each other, special in their own right?

One way: Search for names that carry a similar meaning, one that symbolizes something important to you or for your child, and then go on from that list to pick the two most compatible choices.  I love playing with nameberry’s search names by meaning feature, which you should discover for yourself if you haven’t already.  Clicking on any of the larger categories will take you to more specific name meanings: brilliant, for example, or red-haired.  From there you can go instantly to a list of names with twin meanings.

Playing this name game myself led to some surprising and wonderful choices for twins…and beyond.  Here, some great twin name ideas and their joint meaning.  Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, are you listening?

CLARISSA & LEONORA – bright

EWAN & SINEAD – gracious

ASHER & FELIX – happy

FEDERICA & MILO – peaceful

ESME & IMOGEN – beloved (this one is really perfect, I think)

AURELIA & FLAVIA – golden

ARABELLA & CALLISTA – beautiful

BLAKE & FINLEY – fair

JUDE & TAHILA – praise

ORLANDO & LASZLO or RODRIGO – famous

ALDEN or PALLAS & RAMONA – wise

CYRUS & SAMSON or KALINDI & SURYA – sun

CLANCY & KANE or LOUISE & WALTER or SASHA & OWEN — warrior

In case you’re Octomom, or just looking for a broader range of options, some meanings carry a range of compatible names that can be mixed and matched any number of ways.  For instance:

BECAN, KIERAN, GAVIN, LORCAN, REAGAN & RONAN – little

COLTON, DARCY, DELANEY, DONOVAN, LEILA, SULLIVAN – dark

ADA, ALICE, ARTHUR, FREYA, OBERON, SARI — noble

But you don’t need me to spell out the choices for you.  Check out our search names by meaning page and look up some great combinations yourself.  Note your best ones here – we’d love to hear them!

For even more information and a guide to popular and celebrity twin names, go to our twin names advice page.

Octomom aside, most of us only have the opportunity to name a small number of children. Authors, on the other hand, can name family after family–including the parents. Some–like Jane Austen–were limited by the restricted supply of names available in their milieu, while others could let their imaginations soar.

I thought it might be fun (and instructive?) to look at some of the more prominent brother and sister sets in literature for possible ideas–though you could probably skip Wallstreet Panic.

SISTERS

Alcott, Little Woman

JOSEPHINE, MEG, BETH, AMY

Austen, Pride and Prejudice

JANE, ELIZABETH, MARY, CATHARINE (KITTY), LYDIA

Austen, Sense and Sensibility

ELINOR, MARIANNE, MARGARET

Chekhov, Three Sisters

OLGA, MASHA, IRINA

Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit

CHARITY, MERCY (known as Cherry and Merry)

Eliot, Middlemarch

CELIA, DOROTHEA

Lawrence, The Rainbow, Women in Love

URSULA, GUDRUN

Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

SCARLETT (Katie Scarlett), SUELLEN (Susan Elinor), CARREEN (Caroline Irene)

Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

STELLA, BLANCHE

Woody Allen, Hannah & Her Sisters

LEE, HANNAH, HOLLY

BROTHERS

Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle

MOSES, COVERLY

Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

DMITRI (MITYA), IVAN, ALYOSHA

Dumas, The Corsican Brothers

LUCIEN, LOUIS

Faulkner, several novels

BILBO, VARDAMAN, CLARENCE, ST. ELMO, MONTGOMERY WARD

WALLSTREET PANIC, ADMIRAL DEWEY

VIRGIL, BYRON

Miller, Death of a Salesman

BIFF, HAPPY

O’Neill, Desire Under the Elms

EBEN, PETER, SIMEON

Shepard, Fool for Love

LEE, AUSTIN

Steinbeck, East of Eden

CALEB, ARON

MIXTURES

Barrie, Peter Pan

WENDY (invented), MICHAEL, JOHN

Dickens, A Christmas Carol

MARTHA, BELINDA, PETER, TIM

Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

CASH, DARL, JEWEL, DEWEY DELL, VARDAMAN

BENJAMIN, JASON, QUENTIN, CANDACE (Caddy)

Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga

JOLYON (Jolly), IRENESOAMES, WINIFRED

Hardy, The Return of the Native

CLEMENT (Clym), THOMASIN

Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

CLIFFORD, HEPZIBAH

James, The Turn of the Screw

FLORA, MILES

Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

JEREMY (Jem), JEAN LOUISE (Scout)

Salinger, Franny and Zooey and short stories

FRANNY (Frances), ZOOEY (Zachary), BUDDY (Webb), SEYMOUR, BEATRICE (Boo-Boo), WALTER, WAKER

Salinger, Catcher in the Rye

HOLDEN, PHOEBE, VIOLA, (Allie Vincent –siblings mentioned in other stories)

Shaw, Man and Superman

OCTAVIUS, VIOLET

Sidney, Five Little Peppers

BEN (Ebenezer), POLLY (Mary), JOEL, DAVID, PHRONSIE (Sophronia)

Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

TOM, ROSE OF SHARON, AL, NOAH, RUTHIE, WINFIELD

Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

SEBASTIAN, JULIA, CORDELIA