Creative Baby Names

Supermodel Helena Christensen named her son in honor of jazz great Charles Mingus, opening up a whole category of jazzy possibilities: Kenton, Calloway, Ellington, Gillespie, Mulligan, Tatum, and Thelonius.


Mingus

Merce Cunningham (born with the French version Mercier) was a highly influential avant garde dancer-choreographer and his name still resonates with an aura of bold originality.  


Merce

A musette is both a dance and an antique instrument, but the name is most associated with the classic opera La Bohème.

Musetta

Novelist Djuna Barnes introduced this interesting and unusual name with an arty, Bohemian feel to the mix. She explained that it was invented by her father, saying it came about as a combination of her infant brother's pronunciation of the word moon as 'nuna' and a character in a book her father was reading, Prince Djalma, and so he "put the Dj onto the 'una'." Result: the silent-D pronunciation (as in Django) of JOON-a.
 Fellow writer Anais Nin adopted the name for a character in her 1950 novel The Four Chambered Heart, and Woody Allen had a young girl called Djuna in his 1996 film Everyone Says I Love You — nicknamed DJ.
 All in an, an attractive and intriguing possibility, that could be associated with the names Junia or Una, or to the word "moon".

Djuna

Creative baby names can be drawn from the worlds of art, music, design, fashion, or literature. They are the first names and surnames of famous figures in creative fields, such as Bob Dylan and Anais Nin.

 include Eliel, Georgia, Langston, Orion, Paisley, Prince, Sullivan, and Valentino. Distinctive names with strong ties to their creative legacies include Holiday, Matisse, Rem, and Tennyson.

If you seek to imbue an imaginative or innovative spirit within your child, a name connected to a notable creator may serve to inspire. Below, our picks for the best creative baby names.

Creative baby names inspired by art, music, design, fashion, and literature, such as Tennyson, Leonardo, Holiday, and Anais (Page 6)