What were your naming rules?

[BananaBubbles]

What were your 'rules' when naming your dcs?

I'm curious to know if it had to be modern,classic,unusual,religious,beginning with a certain letter,a family name,popular etc.

Outside the top 100 (i.e. not massively popular already)
Works in German, French and English (due to family)
Sounds good with short surname
That we love the name!

Outside top 50. Old fashioned but 'different'.
We both had to compromise a lot to get to this, good luck choosing :)

Oops forgot another rule - the name had to suit a baby, a child and an adult if you see what I mean. We discounted a lot of girl names on the basis that they were to cute for a woman

Most importantly not a common dogs name, I work with them and have many associations, must be suitable for any age, not cutesy, we must be sure she'd feel confident telling people her name without worrying about being teased, not faddy, must shorten well and not rhyme with anything bad.

Can you see why we struggle?.....

1: Must not be too popular (there were 3 of me in my class at school iyswim)
2: Must be easy to pronounce & not mean anything bad/rude in both English and Spanish.
3: DH & I must agree

#1 is obviously easy to achieve
#2 few names had to be discarded but not too bad
#3 an absolute nightmare :)

Sounds good on a high court judge or on a plumber
Not in top 50
Traditional but slightly left of the mainstream traditional

We ended up with Felix and Theodore (Theo) based on these rules. Theo isn't even top 100 here in Australia although I'm aware it's very popular in the UK. Our third boy will be Kit (Christopher), Reuben or something else we haven't decided on yet!

No names of exes.

No names of living family members.

Something with good nn potential so DC could have options later in case they didn't like the name as much as we did.

Something which didn't sound risible or just pigging awful with DH's awkward surname.

1. known, but not commonly used
2. no friends or relatives with the name, or their children with same name
3. only exception to (2) being deceased relatives
4. Of my husband's nationality

5 ok for an english person to be able to say

1. one we both liked

Biblical, but not too unusual & not a name taken by any family/church friends! We were left with a very short shortlist!

I really only had 1 rule no naming after immediate family.I just dont believe in calling children after mum or dad or uncle dick,they deserve their own name.

Our only really specific rule was: A full name not a shortened version

The others were less easy to articulate but we both kind of knew where we both stood - not so popular there were likely to be three in every class (ie not Jack or Isabel, lovely names though they are), but top 20 was OK, a bit traditional, a bit Scottish, not too out-there (although we were considering Prentice at one stage which breaks most of those rules).

Nothing already in the family.
No extravagant spellings.
Unusual but not celebrity offspring bonkers.
It's got to make us both go, "Yes!"
Parents and parents in law disapproval is a bonus
That's it really, we still havent found THE name though.

Exactly the same rules as Loony, except number 1 is that it mustn't be too UNusual - my name is odd, I've only met one of me ever and new stupid people often don't "get" my name.

No rules whatsoever, which is how we ended up with three totally different names - one top 10 name, one long foreign name, and one nickname as fullname. Perhaps we should have had rules so we sound more like a family....

No B names unless there's an R in the month, which makes things different.

Hazards an illicit

SirE

You're a prick.

SirE

You're a prick.

The names couldn't rhyme with our surname. No weird spellings. Nothing wacky. Their names needed beautiful and pertinent meanings :)

Outside the top 100.

No names of kids who bullied me at school.

No footballer names.

Something that could be shortened to a nickname too.

Common enough that people would know how to spell it, but not so common that half the class would share the name.

Have more than one shortened version, so that he could effectively choose his own name later.

Sound well with the surname.

Not form unfortunate acronym with the initials, e.g. Bernard Albert Morrison.

Our rules -

A name that would grow up well, we wanted something that sounds just as nice on an adult as it does on a child.

An easy to spell/pronounce name.

Something 'normal sounding' I was a shy child who would have hated to have had a weird name and my husband isn't particularly outgoing so the chances our that our children would lean more towards fitting in than standing out.

Something that will look good on a CV (so full names not nicknames, again nothing weird or made up).

No dodgy initials.

No shared first name with a family member although they do have a family middle name.

For the baby I am pregnant with now his name had to sound nice with his older brother's, they didn't have to match but just sound fairly complimentary.

We weren't worried about popularity at all, it just doesn't bother me.

Outside top 100
Not beginning with the same letter as surname
Doesn't make silly initials
A name we both love

Outside top 50
Something we both agree on
Would suit an accountant or a rock star.

Unfortunately everyone else in our area had the same idea. The town is teeming with toddlers with the same name. I fear it's catapulted its way into the top 10

• a positive/strong/good/nice meaning
• no matching initials with either parents or siblings
• outside the top 400 ish
• various nickname options, ideally including one that is unisex, in case they want to be ambiguous on forms or have a sex-change, and one that can start with a different letter to the first letter of the long version (e.g. Elizabeth could be Liz, Anthony could be Tony), and one that is mainstream if they don't want to go by the more unusual full name
• not religious (Greek myth ok though)
• compliment sibling's name
• the above meant no family member would have our chosen names anyway, but definitely no repeats
• Scrabble acceptable. :)