Category: Baby Name News
This week’s news includes statistics from England, Wales and Israel, names inspired by musicians, title names, and boats.
Top names in England and Wales
If you’d like to know what’s hot in Britain, it’s an exciting week: the baby name data for England and Wales in 2016 has just been released! There’s so much to delve into – they include every name given to 3 or more children, which is a pretty big pool – but here are the headlines.
The top names are the nicely-matched Oliver and Olivia. Oliver is number one for the fourth year running, while Olivia returns to the top spot after five years coming second to Amelia. There’s been very little change in the top 10, just Lily replacing Poppy on the girls’ side and Muhammad replacing William for boys. Big risers in the Top 100 include Luna, Aria and Harper for girls, and Arlo, Reggie and Ezra for boys.
It looks like parents haven’t been put off by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s baby name picks: both Charlotte and George rose last year, Charlotte by a whopping 13 places after years of gradually falling. Tune in two years from now to find out if their third child’s name gains in popularity too.
In the news this week: two new tennis babies, lots of names beginning with E and M, and some memorable word names.
Tennis babies
Serena Williams welcomed a daughter a few weeks ago, and she’s just revealed her name: Alexis Olympia. Alexis’s first name matches her father, Alexis Ohanian, and while we don’t know their reasons for picking Olympia, it feels like a good fit. It’s sporty, it’s mythological (tenuous link alert: like Serena’s sister Venus!), and it sounds almost like the much-more-popular Olivia. I can see Olympia appealing to more parents – can you?
Another new arrival in the tennis world is Tara, Novak Djokovic’s daughter. Novak and his wife already have a son called Stefan, whose name is a nod to the church where they were engaged and married. I’d love to know if there’s a story behind Tara’s name.
By Sophie Kihm
When it comes to naming siblings, families have different approaches. Some choose an obvious theme, like Coleen and Wayne Rooney, whose children are named Kai, Klay, and Kit. Others, like Lisa and Jack Osborne, don’t feel the need to have coordinating sibling names—one of their daughters has the sweet, vintage name Pearl, and the other has the androgynous, spunky nickname name Andy.
It will be interesting to see how this group of celebrities adds to their sibsets. Will Boomer Phelps have a sibling with an equally out-there name? Will Kim and Kanye use another word name for North and Saint‘s brother or sister? I’ve made my predictions below, but I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
This week’s news includes names damaged by hurricanes, baby names fit for a prince or princess, matchy first and middle names, and how to handle reactions to your child’s name.
Hurricane names: The fall of Harvey, Katrina, and Irma
Hurricanes are so destructive on lives and property that it may seem silly to be concerned their negative effect on baby names, but perhaps not to people with the name Katrina, Sandy, and now Harvey and Irma. Use of the name Katrina fell by 85 percent after the terrible hurricane that struck New Orleans in 2005. Now the baby name Harvey, which was just coming back into style in the US after a nearly 70-year downturn, is likely to face the same negative fate. And the name Irma is not even going to get her shot, if she ever had one. Sandy was popular enough for long enough that it may escape over-identification with the storm of that name. But anyone named Katrina, Harvey, and Irma will be plagued by hurricane jokes for many years to come.
Royal baby names: Britain and Sweden
You’ve probably heard that William and Catherine, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, are expecting their third child. The world is already placing bets on what George and Charlotte’s little brother or sister will be called.
The best analysis I’ve read is Elea’s predictions – the top contenders include Alice and Arthur. From everything we know about the royal couple, we wouldn’t expect anything outrageous, so the odds of them calling their baby Brexit or Daenerys are roughly zero.
By Linda Rosenkrantz
Not quite as many announcements as usual this month, but still a really interesting bunch. The boys were a particularly international crew, from Bruno to Eamonn to Sven. And of particular note was an amazing set of sibling middle names: Hummingbird, Nightingale, Mayflower and Wildrose! But what was perhaps most striking was a boy named Wren for the second month in a row!
There was one set of boy-girl twins in August: Avalyn Cora–Rose and Alban Isaiah.
Here’s the complete list.