Really popular names

[DulcieRay]

Would you be put off if a name was really popular but you loved it?

I mean like Olivia or Oliver popular?!

Yes, I definitely would. But, obviously, an unpopular name today could be super popular in a few months, so it's always possible you might end up with a really popular name.

Dd1 has a more uncommon name and there are three in her class!

It can't be that unusual then! Have you checked how often it was used in her birth year?

Ds2 had a name outside the 100 in the UK, we didn’t now one other. By the time he was 4 I had come across over 50! Through neighbours, friends, work etc. I have to admit it made me a bit down we hadn’t chosen his middle name as a first- we still don’t know one of them and it isn’t an unusual name.

We didn’t pick Olivia for dd as we thought it would be too common, none in her year or the year either side.

I picked a longtime top ten name for ds because it’s my favourite name ever and he’s the only one in the school.

Meanwhile I know a little girl called Melita (first time I had ever come across the name) and she said there’s another Melita in her gymnastics class, I bet both sets of parents were amazed!

My neighbours dd is called Melita I adore that name

DS has a name which has been top 10 for about the past twenty years. He’s now 15 and has never had another one in his school, either primary or secondary. You really can’t tell how these things will pan out, just go for the name you like.

Out of the top 5 baby names 2018, I know the following amount in real life:

Olivia - 0
Amelia - 0
Isla - 1
Emily - 0
Ava - 1

Oliver - 1
Harry - 5
Jack - 1
George - 2
Noah - 0

I would prefer to avoid popular names but my DS name is quite high on the list, even though we used a shorter version which isn't on it at all. With baby number 2, we have a boy & girl name chosen which aren't in the top 100 or anywhere near but they are not unheard of or unusual, just obvs not popular

DD has a top 10 name for the year she was born and spent 5 years in a three entry form school being the only one in class. We moved and she now goes to a tiny village school - less than 200 children - and there’s another in her year... and another one on our street!

Popularity was not on our radar when we chose, and it wouldn’t still put me off now. We picked the name after she was born and it wasn’t even on our shortlist. I tend to call her by her middle name (not sure how that started...), which is much less popular (top 1000), and her friends think it’s a weird name 😆

Three form entry obvs. One glass of wine too many.

@sparklysunflower it was between the 90-100 names in the year she was born! My dd2s name has been top five for a while and I don’t no anymore!

I just checked and there was fewer than 400 born that year, so in a class of 30 children this seems a lot!!

Yes, to end up with 3 of the 400 girls in the same class is unusual but not that rare. Perhaps the name was popular locally?

One of my dc's name was used 19 times in their birth year and we're not met any of the other 18!

We picked a name for DC5 that we had never heard anyone called.There are several spellings of her name but all sound the same.

For 3 years we never met another one. Then we moved to a different area. Firstly the NDN had a child with the same name. There wasn't one at her school but there was one at gymnastics, a different one at Brownies, another one at dancing. I went to pick her up from Holiday Club and on asking for her was asked "which one?".

Every club she does, every activity there is always another girl there with the same name. When she started secondary in September one of her new friends has the same name.

I've just checked the ONS data for the 2 years before she was born and a few years after. There are around 300 girls a year given one of the spellings of her name. I'm sure all 300 of them live here! Yet in 2010 there were 5279 girls in E&W named Olivia and I only know 2.

It’s a tough one, Oliver, Daniel, Sean, Balonz? Whether to go for popular or yuneek.. or something in between. Just go with what you really like rather than letting others sway you.

I didn't even consider names in the top 100 and ended up with one that was 1700 or so with just 18 children given the same name.

I'd hate to have a common name so don't want it for my child.

That said, I'd only give a proper name not something made up!

“MN is obsessed with how popular in a class / year”
You extrapolate though - you don’t suddenly find yourself in a workplace of 5,000 with 4,000 Olivers do you? Statistically the same rules apply. Less than 1% of babies every year still means that for even the most popular names now, it is simply nothing like the experiences of our generation where you several in a class / work team of the same name.

The current fashion / trend is to be unique. So as there are so many thousands of names now, ‘popular’ names don’t really exist in the way they used to.

Even the most popular name will only be 1 in every 35ish babies of that sex. So you’d be pretty unlucky to have another one in your class.

Less than 1% of babies every year still means that for even the most popular names now, it is simply nothing like the experiences of our generation where you several in a class / work team of the same name.

You have to consider linear popularity once you leave education, though. Jack is a good example of a name which has been unusually dominant for a long time. The 1997 Jacks are at the beginning of their careers and will be joined year-on-year by the next few thousand. We are all going to encounter a lot of adult Jacks over the next fifty years.

You also then need to account for the fact that, shamefully, social mobility in the U.K. has gone backwards and shows little sign of improving for our children’s generation. There’s a good chance that, as adults, people will gravitate towards professions and social groups which are not that dissimilar to the ones that they were born into, so you are likely to encounter clusters of certain names in certain workplaces. For many children, a state school classroom will be one of the most genuinely diverse settings that they inhabit during their lifetime.

“You have to consider linear popularity once you leave education, though.“

Yes definitely true.

Although the reason our generation are so obsessed with uniqueness is because we’re rebelling against our parents’ fashion - my son thinks it’s amazing his name is near the top & was very disappointed there aren’t any others in his year.

^“There’s a good chance that, as adults, people will gravitate towards professions and social groups which are not that dissimilar to the ones that they were born into, so you are likely to encounter clusters of certain names in certain workplaces.”^

This had never occurred to me - really interesting point!

The social mobility of names is very interesting. People always say that soon nobody will be surprised to have their conveyancing done by a Chardonnay- but I bet they will. We live in a grammar school area, and my grammar school child’s friends’ names were very different to my secondary modern school child’s. So much so that there was one “misfit” name in the grammar school group but it turned out that it was a name she had chosen for herself -her real name was Sophia!

my son was very disappointed there aren’t any others in his year.

Really ? I'd be happy!

It's definitely location and social class specific.

There was a thread on here the other day about how underused and classy Chantal was. I grew up in Essex in the 90's and you couldn't move for Chantal/Shantelle/Chantelle's.

Now I live in a 'naice' area of London and I know lots of Edward, William, George, Thomas, Alexander, James, Florence, Eleanor, Beatrice, Imogen, Annabelle etc.

I know Ptolemy and Inigo and Dido and Hector and Cosmas and Rufus and Cecily and Monty and Barnaby and Clementine.

In my area, I only know one child with a double barreled name. I don't know any something-May named children. I don't know anyone with a creatively spelled name or a made-up name. When I travel to other parts of London or Essex you can have almost every girl in a class with a double-barelled name. I don't know any Prince or Princesses, but in certain areas that's a very popular name too.

The national statistics tell one story, but you need to look locally and within your social group to get the full picture of how popular a name is.

And I agree with the point about social mobility as well. I would put good money on a much higher percentage of James's and Annabel's ending up as doctors, lawyers and politicians than Darcee-Mai's and Jaxon's.

Ask yourself how you would feel about having a very popular name yourself? Many people called Steve or Sarah might feel that they'd rather have less popular name?

Let's spin that round. I have an 'unusual and unique' name and bloody hate it. Constantly being asked how to spell it. I receive birthday/Xmas cards even now and my name is spelled wrong.

My brother’s step children had properly unique names and one after the other, insisted on changing them to go to secondary school. All three of them chose simple, short top 10 type names. Think Tom, Sam and Ellie. Except not, obviously.