The most posh/classy names in top 100

[MrsMae]

In your humble opinion, what names (both boys and girls) are the most classy in the top 100.

Here is the link to the latest National Statistics list.

www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase/Product.asp?vlnk=15282

www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase/Product.asp?vlnk=15282

DP and I have discussed ours and they are very different!

I can't find the top 100, sorry!

Thats a hard one. What sounds posh to one person can have bad associations for another.

Is it a "classy name" that you are after?

How about William or Catherine . DD starts school in September and already know of 3 Williams who will be in her class.

Surely poshness is a matter of opinion.

My first name was considered very posh when I was growing up (I am not!), very middle class now, but go back 150 years and it was very scullery maidy.

Why don't you chose names out of the top 100? I crossed it off my list if it was in the top 100, my name is so common I didn't want my DC's to have a popular name as it's a PITA.

Surely poshness is a matter of opinion ?

My first name was considered very posh when I was growing up (I am not!), very middle class now, but go back 150 years and it was very scullery maidy.

Is that you Kate Middleton?!

What BikeRunski says is correct. I have been murdered for saying it before but it's just the way it is. Trends follow this pattern.

Beatrice is an example. when fergie and andrew named beatrice they were really ahead of the trend to the point where Beatrice was 'unusable' for the majority of the population 25 years ago.

I reckon W&K will do the same thing naming their children

at Valium waves at Kate

Surely it is a matter of personal taste and opinion. A person can be 'classy' but a name ? Really?

Anything in the top 100 is by definition fairly popular and will have lost any 'associations'. Personally I'd look outside of the top 100 names - some lovely underused classic names there.

A name cannot be 'posh'. A person can be (and even that is starting to fade imo) and if certain people use certain names we start to associate these names with being posh/chav/whatever.

However I agree that any top 100 name will by definition be so popular that it won't have any associations (there are just so many with that name!).

The names we loved and chose for our children turned out to be outside the top 100, even outside the top 250 I think (not because we were looking for a 'posh' name but because we loved the names and the fact that they're not as overused as the popular ones).

Just looked at the list and even the 100th boys name was still used over 600 times in 2009 .

I think that's what people would like to believe, and it would be nice if it were true. But the fact is that in the year 1988 'Beatrice' was considered unusable, for varying reasons no doubt, by the vast majority of people.

So I think in a given, specific year, a name can be perceived to be too 'posh' for them to use.

I know we all have differing opinions on what's classy, which is exactly my point of the thread.

I don't mean posh as in Araminta I mean classy as in Elizabeth.

Ok if you're not gonna play..

Sophie, Charlotte, Eleanor, Harriet, Francesca

William, Samuel, George, Edward.

Why on earth was Beatrice "considered unusable" in 1988? I might have used it had things been otherwise. Mind you, not many people used Eleanor and Matilda then and I had them ahead of Beatrice. Guess i was just ahead of my time

I did say the vast majority of the population! and to be fair, it raised eyebrows in 1988, even from royalty.... Eleanor and Matilda sound more conventionally 'pretty' than Beatrice. More usable, regardless of fashions imo.

Smart girls names all end in 'a'. Smart boys names are British Kings. So says the Sloane Ranger handbook. Simples :-)

I'm guessing people may have considered Beatrice unusable because Fergie called her DD Beatrice, so people may have been worried about it becoming popular chavvy

I think people are forgetting how unusual Beatrice was for babies in 1988. It was on a parr with announcing birth of baby Ethelreid or baby Hilda today.

Oh goodo. I have two smart daughters' names, one king and a nondescript one!

I remember going "she's called it what?????
I absolutely love it now, and always try and persuade people to use it.

Well, it didn't surprise me much at the time because I assumed they had looked in the family history for a pretty name that hadn't been given for a while. One of QV's daughters was Beatrice. Then there is Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. Eleanor & Matilda are also royal names.

Beatrice was pretty old ladyish in 1988 irrc, hence 'unusable.' Housemaid chic was just starting to come in (Maisie, Molly etc) but the real old lady names you find popular on this forum were a laughing stock.

Really, I've never known any old ladies called Beatrice, so it's just never had that association for me. I don't think it's ever been a particularly common name, has it?