Benthe is a popular Dutch abbreviation of the feminine for Benedict.

Meeri is kind of like Siri with an M. This unusual name is certainly cute and intriguing but would forever be mistaken for Mary.

This is most familiar here as a musical name, via Indian Parsi conductor Zubin Mehta, but it certainly could be used by others.

Trini is a nickname-name that's gender neutral. It was made famous by singer Trini Lopez whose big hit was "If I Had A Hammer".

Nothing but a hound dog.

Raz, like many similar names, is used for both girls and boys in modern Israel. Simple, sleek, memorable.

There were no baby boys named Cay born in the US last year, but there's no reason why there couldn't be, especially with the rise in popularity of the similar Kai as well as the nouveau proper names Cayden, Cayson and so on. Cay Dose was an 18th century German architect and Christian Cay Lorenz Hirschfeld was a German garden historian of the same era.

Walter is an old school boys' name that is gently on the rise again. Short forms include Walt (as in Disney) and Wally, but Wat was once commonly used in England as a diminutive of Walter.

Courtlandt, with its added U, is an English form of the Dutch habitational surname Cortlandt. Cortlandt was a village near modern-day Wijk bij Duurstede, Netherlands. Its name was derived from the Dutch elements cort, meaning "short" or "narrow," and landt, "land."

Once you get past thinking of it as a red-painted building where they keep cows and hay, has a nice plainspoken country-like feel and may make a cooler diminutive than the still-purple Barney.

Actress Kirstie Alley popularized this short form that's been off the popularity register for a decade.

Cay is a rare respelling of the retro nickname Kay, but one that may gain ground as a name that's both simple and unique. Like Kay, it can be a diminutive for any of the hundreds of Catherine variations that start with a C or of more modern names such as Caylee or Cadence. Or it can stand on its own as a sleek contemporary nickname-name.

An lesser-known member of the John-Joan family, though popular in its native habitat, has never emigrated, possibly due to its non-intuitive pronunciation.

It's hard to believe, via a 21st-century sensibility, that Fannie was ever a Top 50 name. But Fannie was even more popular than Fanny in its late 19th-century heyday, and stuck around much longer, staying on the Top 1000 until the 1960s while Fanny fell off in 1940. Today, however, Fannie sounds antiquated at best, and rude at worst.