I dreamed last night that I was in the hospital, in labor, with a baby I hadn’t realized I was going to have. Of course my mind skipped right over all the other details (how did this happen? do we have a car seat? why is this hospital room so enormous and luxurious?) and went directly to “What will we NAME the baby?” In real life, I’d call someone to bring me a baby name book and a notepad; in the dream, I had to come up with names off the top of my head.

For boys, the names that first came to mind: Oliver, Henry, George, Charlie. (Henry is the pseudonym of my fifth child; it was very close to being his name, and I’d be glad for another chance to use it.)

For girls, the names that first came to mind: Genevieve, Penelope, Annabel, Clarissa.

What are the first names that come to your mind, if you imagine needing to name a baby on short notice? No consulting lists or baby name books! Just write down the ones you would think of if you were alone in your hospital room. (I didn’t cheat, and you can see in the comments section how repeatedly sorry I was.)

Dearest Swistle –

While my husband and I are *pretty* sure that the one baby is enough, I think about Theoretical Second Baby all the time.

And one of the things I think about, of course, is what TSB’s NAME would be.

When we named our daughter, we had three names that were Top Contenders. And one of those three still stands out to me as The Name That Got Away. Not that I don’t love my daughter’s name – oh no, I DO. Just that I would LOVE to name another daughter Name 2 from the Top Contenders list.

The thing is… If we WERE to have not just a second child but a second daughter, I think that Name 2 would be out of the running because it shares two syllables with my FIRST daughter’s name. And that’s what I wanted to email you about today, because I thought it might be fun.

At what point are names TOO SIMILAR to be sibling names?

Let’s say my daughter’s name is Gwendolyn, and that the Second Favorite name is Guinevere. Not quite true to life in terms of my own issue, but pretty close: The names begin with the same sound. The emphasis in both names is on that same sound. The nickname possibilities BOTH include that first syllable.

I mean, that to me seems like the biggest PROBLEM: the nicknames. Because even if at home you call the girls Dolly and Vera (or whatever), if their friends decide to call them each Gwen, you are in trouble. I suppose it’s unlikely that if you already had a sister going by Gwen that you’d ALSO agree to be called Gwen, but it’s still POSSIBLE. And this is a game of hypotheticals, after all.

But aside from that first syllable, the names are pretty different! So… are they different ENOUGH that they would work as a sibling set?

What if the names were Madeleine and Madison? Or Bridget and Britney? Or Elinore and Eloise? Or Luanne and Louise? Or Verdabelle and Veronica? Or Marilyn and Marianne? Or Isabella and Isadora?

I feel like there ARE some… boundaries. For instance, Susan and Suzanne seem MUCH too similar to work. Same goes for Mary and Maria, even though the first syllable of each is NOT quite the same. I guess in each case, they are variations on the same name. Maybe that’s the line of demarcation?

Is this all a matter of personal preference? Or are there some Naming Guidelines that can help in the decision making?

Just something I’ve been thinking about for, oh, ALMOST THREE YEARS. Perhaps it would be amusing to puzzle through with your readers.

Much love

I believe that yes, it boils down to personal preference. I am thinking of friends of my late mother-in-law, who deliberately named their daughters Sharon and Karen. Or a friend of a friend who has daughters Ella and Emma. Or of course there’s George Foreman, who named all five of his sons George. And then on the other end of the spectrum there are people who won’t even use two names that start with the same letter or have the same vowel sound.

I think you’re right that MOST people would would have drawn a line by the time we got to two names with the same nickname, or two names that were (or sounded as if they were) variations of the same name. I’ll bet too that most of us feel more strongly about repeated beginnings and rhyming endings than we do about repeated endings (non-rhyming) and rhyming beginnings. And there are other things that can make names feel more/too similar, such as looking similar (even if the sounds are different), or having the same number of syllables, or having the same beginning and ending letters. And of course there’d be exceptions all over the place, for every line we might draw!

Some issues feel like issues during the naming process, but turn out to be a big shrug afterward. For example, I have uncles Jim and Tim. I can imagine thinking rhyming nicknames made the names too close, but it doesn’t feel like a big deal at all now that it’s happened: just a mildly interesting similarity. I still might prefer not to do it with my own kids’ names, unless I loved the name too much to give it up.

I think love factors in very strongly. If you are still thinking of a name several years later, you may decide to go with the “No one REALLY CARES what anyone names their children” philosophy and/or the “Well, it’ll work out, one way or another!” philosophy, and just GO for it. Or you might end up thinking of it as a name you loved nearly as much as the name you used, but unfortunately you could only use one or the other. I have names like that on my list: for example, I love the names Wilson and William, but I was only going to use one or the other. I love Elizabeth and Eliza, but again, only wanted one to use one or the other; I love Edward and Edmund, same deal. Edward and Theodore, that’s more of a flexible area for me, even though both could be Ted. Elizabeth and Eleanor too: I suppose they could both want to use Ellie, but for whatever reason it doesn’t bother me.

Well! It’s a very interesting topic! I’d love to hear where everyone else draws lines, and about pairings that felt too similar or NOT too similar to use!

Update (and photo!) on Baby Girl Streyza, Sister to Georgia Grace!

My two sons lost their father when they were 5 and 12 respectively. The older one bears his father’s name, Richard. Both boys are now having their first child. My older son is having a girl and my younger son is having a boy. My younger son wants to name his son, Richard, after his father, which is also his brother’s name. My older son is angry with him because he feels he will have a second child and if he has a boy he would want it to be called Richard. Is there a wrong or right?

The reason this is such a tricky situation, I think, is that there is no wrong and no right per se, but there are nevertheless a lot of strong feelings about it. Familiar practices (such as a name being passed down through firstborn sons) may be misinterpreted as having rights or ownership or control, for example. A family may even choose to voluntarily defer to the current name-holder, strengthening the feeling that it must be done that way. And many people feel that names should not be duplicated among cousins, even though it used to be extremely common to do so.

I wish we could start with this understanding: that both sons may name children after their father, however they see fit, and that it is WONDERFUL that they both want to, and that it would be an almost heartbreakingly beautiful tribute if both of them named sons Richard. There wouldn’t be a dry eye in the house.

As things stand, instead of a beautiful tribute, we have the makings of a very ugly situation. Your first son would like to reserve his father’s name for a son he very well may never have—which would be fine, except that he also wants to prevent his brother from using the name. I suspect he is viewing the name as a possession, a single item that can only be handed down to one person as if it were a gold watch. The way he may be seeing it, his father gave the watch to him, and now he wants to give it to his own son; meanwhile his brother is trying to steal the watch to give it to HIS son. Your first son is angry at this perceived attempt at theft. He protests that he is very likely to have another child, which may very well be a boy, and so it is too early to grab the watch away from him and his descendants.

But that is not the way names work. Your first son keeps his name even if he gives it to his son, just as your sons’ father kept his name even after giving it to his son; and the name can also be given to both boys of the next generation. No one takes or steals the name away from anyone else; the name is duplicated, and shared, and is another set of bonds to hold a family together. It is sheer pleasure to look through a family tree and see a name winding its way through the generations and branches. This is the sort of imagery I wish families could use, rather than seeing honor names as grabbing precious possessions away from each other.

If your first son can’t be talked around to a different point of view, I don’t know how your second son can get around it. If your first son continues to see the name as a birthright that gives him possession and control, then even if your second son disagrees completely, it may not be worth the family fall-out. I think this would be a crying shame, especially if your first son never does have a son, and so their father is never honored. Your sons’ father shared his name with your first son; but he, and the memory of him, and the privilege of honoring him, belongs equally to both of them.

Hi Swistle!

I have been following your blog for the last several years and would love your input on what to name our little boy!

He will be the brother to Jillian and we would love something that went along with her name and was similar in that most people know of a Jillian but don’t know many! So, we like the popularity level and prefer names that aren’t very popular. We don’t like names from our own generation (we are both in our early 30s). The baby boy’s last name is pronounced “boo-er” and will have the middle name of John. We are stuck on the first name!

We currently like Deacon, Benson, and Levi but aren’t completely sold on any of them. Any help??

Thank you so much!!!
Cristy

This is a letter I didn’t get to from a previous week. The other day, I was out shopping and I heard someone say the name Russell, and I immediately thought of this question. One of my sons has a Russell in his grade, and it’s the only Russell I know—and yet the name is familiar. Russell Booer; Jillian and Russell. Jill and Russ.

Allyson sent me this letter, and I thought it was the sort of letter that might be VERY REASSURING, considering how VERY MANY letters we receive with parents worried that there will be “five in every class” of their favorite names:

Hi Swistle,

I’m not sure if this would be of interest to you, but I was given a copy of the class list at my kids’ daycare/preschool. So many of the emails you get have parents worried about using a certain name due to popularity. This list is pretty interesting- out of the 160 kids, there are only 13 names that are listed more than once, even considering alternate spellings. Of the repeats, 10 names are used twice, one name is used three times, and two names are used four times.

She went on to list WHICH names were the repeated ones, but she and I have agreed not to post those here because it seems as if it puts the focus on THOSE SPECIFIC NAMES. That is, it doesn’t matter which names were repeated; the point is that so few of them WERE repeated. I think in the anxious stage of baby-naming, if I’d seen that one of my favorites was used FOUR TIMES in one daycare/preschool, I’d think that name should be off the list; but actually it only means there is a coincidental pocket of that name in one school.

For example, the two names that were repeated four times each: you might expect those to be Top 10 names. But they were not! One is a Top 50 (but not Top 10) name, and the other is a Top 100 (but not Top 50) name. The name used three times is also a Top-50-but-not-Top-10 name. Two of the repeated names in the list are not even Top 100 names. Only ONE name on the list is a Top 10 name.

The point is that name statistics are national. No one can reassure anyone that there WON’T be a crazy classroom where there are five students with the same name. We can, however, offer statistic-unlikelihood comfort.

We can also offer the perhaps counter-intuitive comfort that there isn’t much that can be done about it: you can give your child the #993 name Cordelia, when you liked the #4 name Isabella better but didn’t want her to be “one of five in her class,” and then in her class there may be two Cordelias and no Isabellas. My brother has a name that was ranked well into the 200s for his birth year, and he was in school all the way through with another boy who had the same name with the same less-common spelling. My name was just barely out of the Top 50 for the year I was born, but there was only ONE classroom my entire school experience that had another Kristen/Kristin in it.

One reason I LOVE getting class lists is that they’re almost always surprising. Some years, there is no duplication at all. Other years, a class will have two Connors, two Williams, two Madisons and an Addison, and three Joeys—plus a Zoe, a Zoey, and a Chloe. Elizabeth had a class of the latter type last year, and she said that furthermore, both Connors had the same MIDDLE name, AND the same surname initial! (They solved it by having one go by Connor and the other go by his first and middle initials.)

I’m not sure exactly the kind of discussion I’m trying to start here, but I trust you to take it from here. I think it would be interesting to hear about Interesting Duplications (two Cordelias, for example), and about surprising NON-duplications (only one Emma, for example). Or we can talk generally about class lists. Or about the impossibility of avoiding duplication. Or about how different areas seem to have different concentrations of certain names, so that one school might not have ANYONE named Everly, while another school is simply BURSTING with them. Or if you have a class list nearby, you can count duplicates: not necessarily listing WHICH names are duplicates, but just how many ARE duplicated. Or you can discuss anything else the topic brings to mind.

Update on Baby Girl or Boy Arnold, Sibling to Xavier!

Update on Baby Boy Verbell!

Hi Swistle

I am currently pregnant due in March. This is my husband and I’s first child and we have come to find out we are expecting twins! When we found out we decided that we wanted to know the gender of the babies so we could decide on names before they come. Looks like we are having a boy and a girl!

I am writing because I would love to hear some of your opinions on good combinations or any other further suggestions on names we like so far.

Girl names we like:
Emery
Arden
Marley
Sadie
Finley

Boy names we like:
Harrison/Harry
Liam
Lucas
Calvin
Wilson

Our last name is Rogers without the R. We would like middle names to be honor names so the ones we are considering are
Girl: May, Rebecca, Nicole
Boy: William, Charles, Clinton, James

I look forward to hearing your suggestions

Thanks

I’m not sure which R is missing from Rogers. I’ve sent an email, and I’ll update when I know. [Update: it’s the first R that’s missing.] In the meantime, I love pairing up names. Such a fun game. Here are some combinations I might make:

Emery and Wilson
Arden and Lucas
Marley and Harrison
Sadie and Liam
Sadie and Calvin
Finley and Liam
Finley and Calvin

I like it when twin names have something in common, even if it’s a very small something. I like that Sadie and Liam are both nickname names. I like that Finley and Liam share a “lee” sound. I like that Finley and Calvin are both six-letter, two-syllable names with three-letter, one-syllable nicknames, and that they share an “in” sound. I like the musical theme of Marley and Harrison, but maybe it’s too much. I like that Arden and Lucas both have five letters. It’s not that I’d sacrifice a name I liked better in order to force a coordination—but I do like when it works out that way.

More girl names to consider:

Brinley
Delaney
Ellery
Ellison
Emlyn
Everly
Garnet
Holland
Hollis
Marlowe
Quincy

More boy names to consider:

Anderson
Davis
Davison
Elliot
Emmett
Everett
Grant
Lawson
Marcus
Nolan
Thompson
Truman
Wesley

Choosing two names at once can be overwhelming. One of the techniques that helped me the most when I was naming twins was to pretend I was NOT having twins, and that they were born one at a time. Our girl baby was Baby A, so I would pretend that I was pregnant with only one baby, a girl, and I would try to figure out what we would name her. Once I had that name in mind, I would pretend that it was some years later and now I was pregnant again, with a boy; what will we name HIM?

Update on Baby Boy Webb, Brother to Grayson: Two -son Names?