Is every girls name in popular usage twee?

[Maximajensen]

I feel like 99% of currently popular/ vaguely popular girls names are twee.

• Top 10: Amelia, Olivia, Ivy, Ava, Evie, Freya

• Vintage/ retro names: Mabel, Elsie, Edie, Bonnie, Ada

• Frilly names: Arabella, Aurelia, Liliana, Viviana

• Even some names adopted from other cultures in an effort perhaps not to be cutesy: Penelope, Sylvie, Clementine

• Nickname names: Lottie, Mimi, Gracie

• Anything ending in an “ie”

obviously lots of overlap here

Not twee:

• Feminisations of male names: Albertine, Thomasina, Edwina, Maxima

• 4 letter international sounding names: Naia, Mina, Sanne, Anna

• Most names in popular usage throughout the second half of the 20th century: Karen, Rachel, Claire

• Most but not all “classic” (royal or literary names)

thoughts?

How are you defining twee if you think it's describes all those names?

I couldn’t care less what people choose to name their children.

Cutesy, a little sickly

Penelope isn't from another culture. Classical names are part of our common European heritage.

Don't like them don't use them 😴

It’s just a matter of personal taste 🤷‍♀️
Presumably most parents using those names would disagree.

I think any definition of twee that includes names like Penelope is so broad as to be meaningless. I agree about lots of the top 10 though.

My DDs both have top ten names that have been high in the lists for years. Their names have been around for centuries. Amelia and Olivia don't sound twee to me. Both derived from Latin. Olivia is a character in a Shakespeare play. Amelia was very popular in the 18th century.

You've pretty much used a circular argument.

twee = Anything currently popular = twee
not twee = Anything not popular = not twee

Not really, a name isn’t automatically twee because it is popular IMO. I think that all the names that are popular at the moment happen to be twee

I think you'll have to define twee.
How are Ada and Penelope 'twee' ?

Albertine, Thomasina, Edwina,

all “twee”.

Grace, Phoebe, Evelyn, Alice, Violet all on top 50 names and I think are strong names and not sickly sweet. I’d go as far as to say Amelia and Olivia are not twee either.

I do agree that “ie” and “a” names can have a tendency to sound cutesy though.

Maybe! Although a nickname I use for my own daughter is in there

Lots of the names that are popular today where popular in the late 19th and early 20th Century.

Basically they are historical names. Some of them are the names of famous people e.g. Ada and if people go back through their family trees they are likely to have a relative with that type of name.

My own DD who was born in 2018 has the name of lots of people's grandmother and great-grandmother Europe wide. (It isn't on your list.) I didn't realise it but she has the name of one of my deceased neighbours who would be in her late 90s if she was alive.

So in short you are saying historical girls names that have come back round in fashion are twee.

My "thoughts" are that it's a matter of perception.
You perceive these names as "cutesy" or a little "sickly" but lots of other people perceive them as attractive names.
Why the need for the judgemental approach? Seems weird and unnecessary.
I've seen people wanting "strong" names for their daughters as if Maisie or Poppy can't be strong women. That's illogical. Parents should simply choose names they like. End of.

Like names that would be given to a series of dolls

The word Twee doesn't mean popular, it means sickly sweet and over sentimental..

Definition of "twee" - excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or sentimental.
It's a judgemental term.
If you were simply interested in trends in names you could have asked about quaint , pretty or sentimental names. But you chose to use a pejorative term.

Most parents to be or new parents of a daughter imagine their baby as being a sweet and cute child and therefore want a name to reflect that

No one think that in 18 years time their daughter could be a fifteen stone Goth so they had better call her Gonk just in case.

I agree, I don't like a lot of girls' names atm. A lot are the anonymous vowel-consonant-vowel Eva-Ava-Evie-Ella-Ellie-Ada-Ivy type that kind of blend into one, or else too frilly for my taste.

I have two DDs and won't post their names as it would be outing, especially together, but they're well known (well, one is Irish so it's well known here if not the UK) but not popular atm. There are plenty out there!

This is an excellent point. Most of the names I thought of when naming my daughter fell under the cute category. A name like Maureen is not twee IMO, but I couldn’t picture it on a baby or child

Penelope Twee was a model in the 60s. 😀

There is nothing objectively twee about names like Mabel and Ava. You're ascribing subjective perceived (hipster?) characteristics of the people who might choose such names to the name itself. Stereotyping, basically

Opinions on names are never objective though… most things in life are subjective. But we form subjective collective opinions. Many people might agree that the name Blaise is modern sounding but it’s a historic saint’s name. Humans can’t help but stereotype it’s part of how we process the world!

How would you define twee here?

I definitely see Violet as more twee than Albertine. Although both flower names, people’s problems with feminisations often centre on the fact that they’re not “pretty” or “sweet” enough, but rather just male names with a suffix tacked onto the end.

Violet was my second choice for a girl. In my view, you can either go along with the twee naming trend, or you can give your daughter a pretty wildly different name which means she stands out and perhaps is automatically assumed to be of a different generation. So I’m not knocking people’s choices, I’m just pointing out quite an obvious trend.