How Nameberry Invented Baby Names

How Nameberry Invented Baby Names

If you watched Nameberry on Shark Tank on Friday night, you heard me talking about the future of baby naming. We’re really excited to introduce you to all the innovations we hope to bring to Nameberry.

Along with where we’re going, we want to establish where we came from – and how we invented the culture of baby names as we know it today.

Nameberry launched in 2008, created from ten ground-breaking books about names coauthored by me and Linda Rosenkrantz. It seems crazy now that these ideas are so mainstream, but when we published our first book Beyond Jennifer & Jason in 1988, Linda and I were the very first authors to:

Organize names into lists based on style, image, gender, origin, religion, and history.

– Tabulate a list of the most popular names in the US.

– Discuss cultural influences on name trends, creating the first lists of celebrity baby names and literary names and royal names.

Predict name trends, identifying groups of names still trending today such as o-ending names, gender neutral names, and Irish surname names.

– Forecast the advent of place names and word names and nature names for babies, expanding the lexicon of names in common use.

– Advise parents on how to navigate all the factors like family pressure and couple disagreements and honor names that can influence their choices.

The concepts we invented, all in the baby-naming vernacular today, include:

The Hundred-Year Rule – In Beyond J & J, we called the “The Hundred-Year Cycle,” writing, “A startling number of the names that sound fresh and appealing to us today were favored by the new parents of a hundred years ago.”

Sibset Names – We wrote that siblings’ names should be harmonious in rhythm and style but different enough to avoid confusion, an accepted tenet of baby-naming today but a novel concept in the era of siblings named Larry and Harry, Ellen and Eleanor.

Sweet Spot Names – We created the ideal of names that are neither too popular nor too unique favored by many parents today.

Nameberry is still a small, independently-owned company, managed by me and CTO Hugh Hunter, who built the original site. Our lean staff includes editor-in-chief Sophie Kihm, who is also a perinatal therapist, and senior editor Brynn McKeon, who also moderates our forums.

(Cofounder Linda Rosenkrantz has retired from baby naming but the movie based on her book Peter Hujar’s Day just debuted to rave reviews at Sundance. And the TV show based on my book Younger is a Top 5 show on Netflix!)

Nameberry has grown to become the biggest (in terms of content and audience) website devoted to baby names in the world. Last year, we hosted 31 million unique users from every country on earth. Visitors trust us to give them everything they need to choose the perfect name, an important decision that reverberates across the generations.

Now we’re reinventing baby names yet again. Hear our vision for the future of baby names on Shark Tank.

And sign up here for an exclusive invitation to be part of what’s next for Nameberry and the world of names.

About the Author

Pamela Redmond

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.