To all of you who want an unusual/quirky/'out of there' name for your offspring....

[2kidsintow]

Think first! My name is Tamzin (not as unusual as some, but pretty unusual at the time I was a child - it was years and years until I met another) and I do like an unusual name now I am an adult, but found it difficult as a child.

Unusual can be lovely, but do your child a favour and pick a name...

....that they won't have to be spelling out for everyone every time someones asks for their name.

....that people can pronounce easily when they read it written down (poor, poor children in some of my classes who lament that they never have their name said properly).

...that isn't so unusual that no other children have ever heard of it...so unusual in fact that it gives the horrible high school children who have never met you before an easy excuse to laugh at you- personal experience speaking here :(

Damn you norks, you beat me to the goat gags.

I always wanted an unusual name!

amberleaf is an unusual name amberleaf

oh no! nono no

don't start with the goat stuff agian lol

i once ate a goat called Jessica. She belonged to my friend. She also had goats called Frank and Betty

Agree with tiy.

OP, even mainstream names sometimes need spelling out. Jayne/Jane, Clair/Claire/Clare, John/Jon, Stephen/Steven, Katherine/Catherine. Big deal - no!

There's no more point in saying this about unusual names than there is normal names - unless it's spelling is completely different to its pn its going to cause no more problems than Holly/Hollie, Catherine/Katharine/Kathryn is.

I know an Akacia/Blayde/Blaise/Amethyst, and none of them get any stigmatism because of their unusual names.

x-p. I don't agree with the eating of goats!

I think I must've met some v lazy people growing up as they managed to shorten and twist my name into some v strange and annoying alternatives... and my middle name is a Welsh spelling of an English sounding name so that is where my 'can't say it right' comment came from (although I forgot to put that bit in!)

I wonder how many people want an unusual name for their offspring because theirs is more traditional, or people like me who have traditional names for their children because they have an unusual name.

My criteria for name choices was simple....
nothing that sounds rude (see the thread on here about someone asking whether Fanny is an appropriate name for their daughter, for example)/is said in an annoying way around here/something people won't always have to ask how to spell/something people generally know how to pronounce.

Yes, they are my arbitrary rules....surely everyone's own set of rules they choose can be viewed as arbitrary by others?

well yes, of course everyones own personal rules for names and stuff are arbitrary

everyone else isn't coming on and saying "do your child a favour" and pick a name that abides by their rules though are they?

nohun goat is kinda nice. like lamb

not that i eat either now because i am veggie/almost forced vegan due to food intolerances

well.... you say that. i wish i had called all mine the same thing.

ds1 begged me to call both his brothers the same name as him

i can never remember their bloody names. every time i call one i say the wrong name. if i'd given them all the same name this would not be a problem

I hate my name. It was probably considered posh back in the late 60's when I was born. Never knew another one until my teenage years. Now there has been a character with the name in most of the soaps. It seems common/chav now.

Wow Bluddy....confusing.

I always have a smile at whole families of siblings whose parents have chosen a particular rule to choose their names by. E.g. all starting with the same letter (always interesting to discover who the letter belonged to when one arrived entitled Mr A 2kidsintow as all the males in his family started with A and had middle names with the same initial as each other too) or the friend who chose her daughters names so they all ended with the letters 'ah' even though it meant pretty much making up the spellings of her daughters names to fit her rule.

He he....after running through all our names my Dad would give in and just call out 1 or 2 depending on birth order. Simples.

And my father in law just called all his daughter's in law Sheila on general principle.

I always wanted an unusual name as a child. There were three Emmas in my (very small) year group at primary school alone. To make things worse we all had the same feckin middle name so couldn't even be seperated that way! (Think born in the 1970's - begins with L, goes with Emma). No prizes for guessing what that might be!!

DD1 asked m eonly the other day why I picked her name (Romilly). She said that she'd like th same name as at least one other person she knows.

Funnily enough, I know of about 8 Romillys - making it probably one of the most popular names of all the names that friends, friends of friends etc have used.

By the way, my name is traditional, but has been fairly underused, and I always liked not being identified by my name and the first inital of my surname, but was always a bit miffed I could never buy a pen with my name on, on school trips.

My parents wouldn't have bought me shit with my name on even if it had been possible!

I have a very unusual name which I am very fond of. In fact I think if I ever met another person with my name I would be mightily peeved. dh has the number one name for his birth year, but never came across many until university where there really were tons of them and it wasn't great.

I think that names are very important and should be considered long and hard, my two have names that were more mainstream than mine and less popular that dh's, but have now become very popular and I think that is a bit of a pity. However dd has only this year shared a classroom with another girl with her name, and we've never come across anyone with ds's (although this had a popularity explosion a year or two after he was born).

I had two Tamsins in my class at school, so it doesn't seem unusual to me at all!

I think there is some truth in what 2kidsintow says.

My name is Jane, my cousins names are Kate and Rachel. We recently had a discussion about how much we love our plain names. Although as children we wanted the more out their names.

Our granny picked unusual names for our mothers, in the 1950s (see unusual was popular even then), which may have influenced them.

P.S. I have never met a Tamzin.

My name is fairly unusual, the only other person I knew when growing up with the name was given the name because her mum was in hospital having her older brother when my mum had me and liked it so much she used 2 years later for her dd. I love it, the only annoying thing was I couldn't get anything with my name on (plates, cups and things), but now I see it on lots of things. My surname is extremely unusual as well, so much so that 16 years after having me at Reception age, the teacher I worked with as her TA remembered me!

my name is so 80's its not funny but i love it even tho i know millions of me going around :)

my DD has my middle name and thought that if bump was a girl she'd have the same middle name too she just assumed because we both have it every girl in the family would have it she's so cute :)