We’re always adding new names to Nameberry, and the ten newest on the site all just happen to be for girls.

Half of these names existed on Nameberry before as variations of other names, but without commentary of their own, and the other half are new entries.  All have ancient roots though are unusual — yet usable — in modern times.

Our newest girls’ names for 2013:

Adelina

Adelina is back in the Top 1000 after an absence of nearly a century, thanks to the meteoric rise of her sister name Adeline — along with Adelaide, Adele, and Ada.  Some parents choose Adelina because they want to get to cute vintage nickname Addie, but others favor it as a slightly more unusual form of this sweet vintage girls’ name. 

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It’s an all girl baby names issue of Appellation Mountain‘s Abby Sandel’s Nameberry 9 newsiest names this week.

Did you hear?  Barack Obama declined to offer baby name advice.

The president hosted a fireside chat on Google+ last week.  He tackled complex, divisive topics like the environment and the economy.

But baby names?

When writer and vlogger John Green introduced his wife, Sarah, and asked Obama if he’d help them choose a name for their second child, the president passed.

Had Green asked that question on the Nameberry forums, we would have all dived in fearlessly.  What’s your firstborn’s name?  Do you have any middles picked out?

Giving baby name advice is tough.  It means sorting names into the good and the bad, or maybe the good and the less good.  Explaining why we like a name is nearly impossible sometimes, isn’t it?  Explaining what we dislike can be too easy.

This week’s news was filled with gorgeous girls’ names representing every possible style and trend, from imports to underused classics to modern discoveries.

The nine most newsworthy baby names are:

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If there’s one British baby names trend that Berries all over the world have embraced full-heartedly, it’s the old upper class practice of giving children two (or even more, ala Uma Thurman) middle names.

Rooted in royalty as a way to honor a raft of vaulted relatives, the multiple-middle-name practice was pegged by one visitor to our pages as being “very posh and a bit snobby.”

But it’s also a way for name lovers to indulge their enthusiasm by using more of their favorites on fewer children.  Americans who give their babies two middle names are often simply packing more name power into one extended appellation.  They may also (as my husband and I were, when we named our daughter Rory Elizabeth Margaret) be adding extra middle names to honor both sides of the family at the same time.

Judging from the birth announcements in the London Telegraph, the three-barreled British baby name is distinct in a couple of important ways:

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Our tally of the 100 most popular girls’ names of 2012 on Nameberry is in, and we have a new Number 1: Katniss.

The predominance of Katniss is more a testament to the power of the Hunger Games franchise than to baby name trends.

Our Number 2 girls’ name Charlotte, which has been Nameberry’s most popular girls’ name every year until now, is more reflective of a name that will actually be chosen by parents.  Imogen, which has moved up from Number 6 to claim the Number 3 spot, is another choice we see on the rise in the real world, though it has yet to break into the U.S. Top 1000.

Katniss is also the girls’ name that has risen the furthest on our list, followed by Penelope, propelled upward by its choice as a Kardashian baby name.

The girls’ names that have risen the most places since our 2011 count are:

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To clear up any misunderstanding, let me say straight off that these are not literally sister and brother names — you would decidedly NOT want to name your children Oliver and Olivia or Seren and Soren.

What we’re talking about are names themselves that are closely related, male and female versions of names with similar sounds and feels, too close to bestow on actual siblings but offering parents boys’ and girls’ choices of what are virtually if not literally the same names.

We’ve written a lot recently about unisex names — the same name used for both genders, like Rory or Emerson — and we’ve also touched on the recent phenomenon of boys’ names that have risen to popularity on the coattails of their trendy sisters: Emmett from Emma, for instance, or Everett from the Eve contingent.

That can work the other way too, with a fashionable boys’ name inspiring the rise of a similar-sounding sister name.  In fact, does it really matter which gender’s popularity comes first?  We see a lot of trendy names these days with both female and male counterparts, so that if you’re attracted to a certain sound or style, you can use whichever version of the name fits your baby’s gender.

Some of these pairs, like Alexa and Alexander or Felicity and Felix, are connected in a conventional way: the female name is literally an offshoot of the male name.

But others don’t share an origin and developed separately, only to be connected at this point in baby name history by their similar feel and the desire on the part of parents for baby name parity, even if they’re not interested in using unisex names.

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