During the hundred times you’ve watched The Wizard of Oz, you may have noticed that it isn’t a particularly fertile source of interesting names.  There’s Dorothy of course, and Aunty Em and Uncle Henry, plus the farm names of Dorothy‘s companions on the Yellow Brick Road–Hunk, Hickory and Zeke–and the nasty, bike-pedaling Miss Elvira Gulch.

But it happens that this was just the first in a series of Oz books.  L. Frank Baum himself wrote 13 more, with titles such as The Patchwork Girl of Oz and Rinkitink in Oz, and then other authors stepped in to bring the number up to 40.  Just looking at the Baum creations alone, you enter a wonderland of wildly inventive appellations of the Princess-Fluff/Professor Nowitall variety–not particularly baby-appropriate–

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