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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Click here for lots more classic names.

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With a number of classic names taking a downward turn these days, it’s nice to see that a few are going in the other direction—William, James, Charlotte –and one that we’re especially happy to see making a return: our featured name of the day, Alice.

Alice is unique among the body of traditional, classic girls’ names.  She’s more feminine and dainty than Mary and Helen, more substantive than Ann or Jane or Jean, yet with more lightness, sweetness and innocent charm than Margaret and Katharine.

From the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, Alice was an enormously popular Top 20 name–reaching as high as Number 8 several times—then slowly made its way down until 2005 when it suddenly reversed direction again.  Tina Fey named her baby Alice the following year, and from then on its upward trend has accelerated, with the name getting to 142^nd place last year.

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Name lover Kristin Alexander, creator of the blog What She Said, went crazy over baby girl names.  Her story:

“BRAHNwyn!” he said incredulously. “BRAHNwyn?”

“Well, when you say it like that, it doesn’t sound very pretty,” I pouted.

Granted, Bronwyn was a guilty pleasure. I didn’t really expect my husband to go along with it as the given name for any daughter we might have. But must his voice take on that grating nasal edge when he said it out loud? He sounded like a goose honking.

No more than eight weeks up the duff, I was still newly pregnant when my husband and I began discussing potential baby names for our unborn child. I had just informed him that I really liked the name Bronwyn Rose for a girl, but admitted that with the last name of Alexander, I was worried about her initials spelling “bra.”

“That’s your only concern about the name Bronwyn?!” my husband asked in amazement.

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