M. writes:
Hello! I’ve been enjoying your site for sometime. I’ve been a name nerd since childhood and had great fun naming my 3 children with my husband. We are not currently expecting another, and honestly do not know if we’ll stop at 3 or try for a fourth (or more…). There is one thing that has come into my mind a great deal, though, when it comes to names. I haven’t seen this on your site (though I may have missed it) and I was wondering if your or your readers could offer insight.
All three of our children have different initials, that is different letters starting their names. None of them share an initial with my husband or I, which makes it easy when writing things down since there are 5 different letters to represent the 5 different people in our family. As much as my husband thinks this is silly, I’ve decided that should we add any more children we will keep with different first initials for this very purpose. We have another 21 letters available to us so that shouldn’t be a huge issue, right?
Beyond this, no one has a similar consonant sound (so no Philip and Fiona, no Cecil and Sarah, etc) AND none of the kids have a similar ending to their names, all different consonant and vowel sounds. So that’s where it gets a little tricky to me. I feel like it makes perfect sense to go with a different first initial for any future children, but given our children’s names now should we keep up the big differences? Not sharing a sound at beginning nor end? We have a hard C, does that do away with a K or Q name? Does the “-on” ending of one child’s name mean we probably shouldn’t use “-yn” or “-en” for another child’s name? Or is this just over stretching? Since we tend to fall toward unplanned nicknames anyway, should we just try to control the initial and let the rest fall into place?
Even if we kept up with strict differences, we still have a plethora of sounds available to us. We haven’t ended any name with and “-ee” sound yet, nor an “-el” or “-et” or “-er”. So the question isn’t really what to do with keeping these strict rules on our potential future child/ren’s names, but rather, should we be applying these rules to keep up with a precedent we seem to have set?
Thank you so much!
This sounds to me like a recipe for intense stress—and exponentially more of it with each additional child. If it would be a fun challenge to play around with, I say, “Sure! Go ahead and try!” But in general, I think the more children in a family, the MORE flexible the parents should be about names, rather than less. I touched on this a little in Preferences vs. Requirements. Here’s the section I’m thinking of:
With two or three children, I think it might be reasonable to want not to share any beginning sounds, any ending sounds, any dominant sounds, or any vowel sounds. With four children, I think it’s time to re-evaluate that for actual importance. A family of Leo, Asher, Simon, and Ivy does not make me think “OMG, they repeated the long-I sound!! Don’t they realize their children are INDIVIDUALS??” On the contrary, I’d think what a good job the family had done finding such completely different names that nevertheless went together well.
In my own family, I found it somewhat freeing: instead of thinking, “Hm, nothing seems to go PERFECTLY with the name Robert,” we were thinking each new name just needed not to stand out oddly from the group. Instead of feeling like any two names might go together too well and leave the third out, it felt like a larger group made differences/similarities blend in. Instead of feeling like we couldn’t repeat an ending, it seemed like it was far less noticeable and far more fine to do so. I even felt like we could go a bit off-style if we wanted: people seem to expect less sibling-name coordination in a larger group—and in fact, getting the names too coordinated makes it a lot harder to remember who’s who.
I did, however, want to keep different initials; it really is so, so convenient. (We do have one parent/child initial repeat, but that one doesn’t seem to matter.) But even with that, I would have been flexible for The Best Name: if two people DID share first initials, we could have switched to using TWO initials on things, and it wouldn’t have been a huge inconvenience.
I wouldn’t worry at all that you’ve set a precedent you now need to continue; I would be much more worried about the thousands of wonderful names you’d be eliminating from consideration. I am very, very interested in baby names, and yet I absolutely would not have looked at a family’s first three children’s names and thought, “Whoa, no matching endings or beginnings, and no similar consonant or vowel sounds? THAT’S going to be hard to keep going with if they have more kids!” It isn’t as if you’ve named your first three Brittany, Bradley, and Brinley, and want to know if you need to keep going with Br- and -y; the LACK of similarity is not something people will pick up on, or notice if you stop doing it.
But again, while it’s still FUN, it could be an interesting challenge. As soon as it stops being fun, though, I’d abandon the idea entirely.
I have similar questions about my children. My first two’s first names start with a vowel but if we have a third, should the first name also start with a vowel or can I go a different direction? That being said, my advice for you would be to go with the name you like, without worrying about the pattern that has already been established. The kids won’t care and as soon as that baby is born and you start calling it by it’s name, it will seem like the most natural thing in the world.
In my family, we have parents A&J and kids soft-G&W. I’ve really never worried too much about repeating A or J, as parents our stuff really doesn’t need to be initialed all that much. I DID NOT want to repeat G or W though, and over time, I’ve also eliminated J. That has more to do with the start sounds, I get the names of my husband and kid-with-soft-G jumbled a lot, way more than I mix up the names of G&W.
Other than repeated initials/start sounds, I don’t think it matters too much in a larger group. I would notice the matching endings of Parker & Tucker. I wouldn’t notice it as much with Parker, Brooks & Tucker-and I wouldn’t notice/care about the repeated “K” sound at all.
We have a third child on our way and hope to someday add a fourth, so we’ve done some thinking about this, too. We very firmly do not want to repeat starting sounds, because I get too mixed up. I know this because when my brother, who has the same starting sound as my son, comes to visit, I get super flummoxed trying to keep their names apart. So that means that not only are more J names out, but also soft Gs. Someone else might get names jumbled less easily than me, and in that case, I don’t think it’s at all a problem to repeat starting sounds – it just is much easier for me not to.
We also prefer to avoid ending sounds repeating, especially if it’s the same number of syllables. That is more flexible, though – we just want the names to have a sufficiently distinct sound. We’re not so particular about avoiding this with all possible nicknames for our children’s names, though, because you can’t quite know where you end up with nicknames since they are so organic! We’re also not opposed to repeating SOME sounds, just not beginning or end.
We do know that we have a finite end goal in mind with family size, though, and we have long lists of names in mind that we love that would carry us through the last addition, boy or girl, with these “rules” intact… and if they started being burdensome, we’d happily abandon ship, because I don’t think the LACK of a pattern is easily picked up on by outsiders.
I agree with the “do it so long as it’s fun” mantra – that it’s a cool challenge for a name nerd but that it shouldn’t cause you tons of stress and many people won’t notice if you stop using the rules anyway. (And I would also still refrain from repeating first initials).
To answer your theoretical how-strictly-to-apply-the-rules question, if it was me using your rules I would go by pronunciation rather than spelling, so if you have a Landon already, I would not then use Jocelyn because although they end in different letters, the sound is pronounced the same way. But if you had an Emily already and wanted to use Marie, I might consider that on the grounds that Emily’s “ee” sound isn’t in the stressed syllable but Marie’s “ee” sound is (and I’d give Marie even more consideration if Emily was often called “Emma” because then you’d rarely hear the “ee” sound anyway). And for me personally, if I was using these rules, a hard “C” would eliminate “K” and “Q”, a Philip would eliminate a Fiona, etc.
If you did (understandably) decide to abandon the rules, I think the names would continue to sound more different from one another if you repeated a sound from the first or second child’s name for the fourth one rather than repeating a sound from the third child’s name. Katherine, Rupert, Leo and Quinn sound more individually different to me than Katherine, Rupert, Leo and Arlo.
(Just realizing how long this is – I hope it helps/makes sense!)
Oooh! Fun question! My husband and I have three children and have tried to always use different starting initials and different dominant vowel sounds in each name… while making them all coordinate and seem “balanced”. What we didn’t figure on was our middle child going by a totally different nickname than we intended for her. That messes a lot up, but we’re thrilled that she loves her name. So… my vote would be go ahead and make a puzzle out of it (it IS fun), but if life gets in the way, it’s not a big deal.
My first 2 kids are Peter and Leo and when we were expecting #3, I realized that I really didn’t want to add any more long E sounds to the family. 2 kids with the same dominant vowel sound was okay, but another would have been too much. Of course, all the names we liked seemed to have long E’s all of a sudden, but we got past it. Now that I have a Timothy, I’d add short I to my list of try-to-avoid-them vowels, but it wouldn’t be a deal breaker if it was the only name we could agree on. My current favorite boy name is Sebastian, which manages to have different starting, vowel, and ending sounds from the other boys’ names. I suppose I might actually have a girl, in which case there are plenty of options we’ve been tossing around for a decade. There are a lot more girl names with A’s in them than boys’ names. I wouldn’t mind short-E either. I would definitely avoid having a second child’s name ending in -o because it seems more distinctive than other sounds.
I’ll dispute the comment that you don’t have to initial parent’s belongings. My 14 year old now wears the same size as my husband and my 13 year old is nearly my size. So, I suddenly have to initial our clothes.