Why has it taken so long for us to discover Italy? The name, that is.

Soul singer Cuba Gooding and his actor son of the same name put this unexpected geographical name on the map for boys, but it has a longer history of use than you might expect. Deriving from the island in the Caribbean Sea, it had a brief spell of popularity in the US at the end of the 1890s when Spain lost possession of the island during the Spanish-American War. Used predominantly (though rarely) on girls throughout the last century, it has occasionally be given to a handful of boys too.

Evocative of the beautiful South Pacific islands, Samoa has very occasionally been used as a given name in American Samoa, Cambodia, Papua New Guinea, and Brazil. Also used as a surname, Samoa could mean "holy centre" or "sacred middle", though other theories include it was the name of a local chieftain or from an indigenous phrase meaning "place of the chicken", moa being the Samoan word for the fowl.