Abby Sandel of Appellation Mountain focuses this week on some bold and daringly unusual girls’ names that made baby name news.

Some weeks I’m astonished by the range of names we can choose for girls.

We love our children regardless of gender, but when it comes to talking baby names, many of us seem to be on Team Pink.  The statistics bear this out: almost 79% of boys born in the US in 2011 received a Top 1000 name, while the same is true for just 67% of girls.

2012 social media babies Like and Facebook were both girls, and rumored baby Hashtag is also supposed to be a she.  Meanwhile, former #1 name Mary has plummeted to #112, while her male counterpart, John, remains a relatively common #27.

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Sometimes we feel we’ve heard every name in the book…..until someone introduces us to a new one.

Actually, that happened just now, when our friend the wonderful photographer Fran Liscio, who took the picture of me and Linda on the home page, just wrote to say she’d heard an unusual name in a 1941 movie called Smiling Through — Moonyean.  Had we ever heard of the name Moonyean?, she wondered.

Nope, we told her: She’d stumped the masters.

Which made us think it might be fun to challenge YOU to stump the masters, i.e. tell me and Linda and the rest of the Nameberry community about an unusual name you’ve heard that you think we may not have come across.

All names already in the Nameberry database are off limits, naturally.  When you suggest a new name, all documentation — movie character lists, newspaper stories, non-U.S. baby name sites — are helpful.  Plus tell us as much as you know about the origin, meaning, and background of the name.

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The writers of a new name book go out on a limb–and then some–to come up with some unusual baby names you never, ever, would have thought of.

People often ask us how the heck we, two colleagues who live on different continents, and with a total of zero children between us, came to write a baby name book.

It started with an office email about the names of our childhood pets—Miek gave all his tank pets outrageous names like ChunksOfLoveAndLikeAndStuff, A+ Nachos, and Wraaakkkk, while Kerry believed she had discovered the perfect name—July—and so whenever her fish died (which was often), she simply replaced it with a new one, but kept the same name.

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It’s easy to confuse popularity with stylishness.  Many baby names feel “popular” when they’re merely stylish: We’re hearing them a lot, they’re in step with the baby name fashions, and we worry that if we choose them, our little Matilda is going to be one of many.

And perhaps if you live in some edgy, baby-centric enclave – Park Slope, Brooklyn, say, or Bernal Heights in San Francisco – that will be true.  But for the most part, the numbers tell a different story, with many of the most stylish names used by very few parents.

One note: Names can be popular and stylish, so many of those in the popular column also qualify as stylish.

Looking just at girls’ names today, here’s a statistics-based reality check on what’s stylish vs. what’s truly popular.  (Numbers in parentheses represent how many babies were given that name in the most recent U.S. count.)

Allegra (114) is stylish, though Arianna (4,797) is popular

Aurelia (209) is stylish, but Amelia (5,417) is popular

Azalea (164) is stylish while Violet (2,531) is popular

Beatrix (123) is stylish while Alexa (5,012) is popular

Blake (240) is stylish, while Payton (3,561) is popular

Carter (158) is stylish while Kennedy (2,803) is popular

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Nameberry Nine columnist Abby Sandel of Appellation Mountain trolls the web this week in search of the newest, most modern monikers.  Here, her report.

The arrival of Blue Ivy, firstborn daughter of Beyonce and Jay-Z, was a signal for every commentator to discuss wacky celebrity baby names once again.  It is a topic that never seems to grow old, though many name cognoscenti rated Blue as relatively tame, perhaps even less original than we’d expected from the stylish duo.

Ellen DeGeneres congratulated the couple, then revealed their secret – The Celebrity Baby Name Generator, issued to every star.  While Ellen and her partner Portia and childless, she gave the BNG a spin to see what they’d name their twins.  The answer?  Banjo Fire Escape and Elbow Gas Lamp – the latter, she quipped, obviously a boy’s name.

Despite all of this gentle mockery, I’ve fallen in love with modern word names over the past few years.  Maybe it is because of all those blog babies with such adventurous appellations:  Reverie, Morrow, Drummer, Glow.  Based on the chatter on the forums and in recent blog posts, I’m not alone at Nameberry.

This week’s Top Nine suggest that world is adapting to a much broader pool of given names:

King – American parents might choose this regal name in memory of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr.  But he made headlines last week as one of the names most frequently rejected by New Zealand naming authorities, along with fellow royal titles Prince and Princess, plus noun name Justice.

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