I relish the days when, in the service of nameberry, I allow myself to click through to the birth announcements in Britain’s Daily Telegraph. The upper-crusty British baby name trends and eccentric (to the American ear) name combinations, oblivious to any conventional notions of “flow,” are my idea of top-flight entertainment.
For my latest survey, I set myself the task of listing only those offbeat names that reflect the English sensibility but are rarely heard heard in the United States – or indeed anywhere else in the world. (They may be rarely heard in Britain too — there are lots more Thomases than Teklas — yet they’re in keeping with upper-class British style.)
What I didn’t suspect was how many of them there were. Choices that originally seemed natural for the list – Henrietta and Imogen, for instance – had to be offloaded to make way for more extraordinary names.
What remains is a selection of quirky British baby names (not all of them actual English choices), many of which are utterly (utterly, dahling!) charming and could bear far more use in the larger world.
Girls
AMBERLEY Rose
LOTTIE Olive and LOTTIE Pamela
ROSANAGH Beatrice
boys
DAINTON Joshua
TALAROA (TAL)
Pamela Redmond
Pamela Redmond is the cocreator and CEO of Nameberry and Baby Name DNA. The coauthor of ten groundbreaking books on names, Redmond is an internationally-recognized baby name expert, quoted and published widely in such media outlets as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Today Show, CNN, and the BBC. She has written about baby names for The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, and People.
Redmond is also a New York Times bestselling novelist whose books include Younger, the basis for the hit television show, and its sequel, Older. She has three new books in the works.