How much do you think the rate a name is used actually matters?

[RonSwansong]

Clunky title! Just musing - am on a WhatsApp group at the moment and the names are:

Emma
Emma
Emily
Lily
Ellie
Ellen
Alice

🤣

Just noticed how samey they are although we’ve never had any issue keeping track of who’s who.

Just see so many people stressing about Evie/Ava/Ada, Lyra/Lola/Lilah, Freddie/Teddy/Eddie etc. My own kids I tried to avoid super popular names but they absolutely love it whenever they meet someone with their same name!

Was ever thus though I suppose - I’m sure back in the day you couldn’t move for baby Joans and Alfs.

I have a friend with a very very common first name+last name combo. She really likes her name, because it's so difficult to find her on the Internet. If you search for her name, you find so many people with the same name. If you want to find HER, you need to know something else about her already. She thinks that is a good thing.

Ooh yeah I hadn’t considered that aspect at all!

Having a common name that is shared with others is a huge risk for mistaken identity and fraud!

I think geography plays a part too. I went with popular names but my DC have yet to meet anyone with their names. The names are popular UK wide but not in Northern Scotland where we are.

As someone who went through school being addressed as ‘first name + surname initial’ to differentiate me from the billion others with my name (and still happening in the workplace now) I’d personally avoid it. It gets very wearing.

We have a long, "foreign" surname which is unusual in this country, and very difficult for most people to spell and pronounce.

We deliberately chose fairly simple, mainstream, popular first names for our kids. That way at least they only have to spell out one of their names.

Popular names aren’t the same as they used to be as a wider range of names are used. Personally the only names I know where you’re pretty much guaranteed to be name+surname as a kids round here is Oliver / Henry and Olivia / Isabella / variants. But that will vary between regions

We are a mixed heritage family and chose a name from my DH's country for DD1 that would also work well and be easy to pronounce in the UK.

She now goes to school in the UK and is (somewhat expectedly) the only one with this top 1000 girls name in her class, however, there are 4 girls with names that rhyme with hers (think Clara, Tara, Zara and Lunara type of thing) so it hardly sounds different or a little unusual which is what we'd hoped for 😅

Pregnant with DD2 now and the only name we can both agree on is a one that's very popular in the UK. It's not bothering me in the slightest this time round. The combo with the surname makes it less common anyway.

I used what I thought was an unusual name, but DD ended up with another in her primary school classes.

I grew up with a relatively common name and found it annoying. So did my husband.

We sought to avoid this problem for our own child. The name ranking systems don’t deal with variations of names, so as a data scientist, I collapsed the lists for spellings and common variations, then reran the rankings. I also didn’t just want to use the latest lists, for names of interest, I checked trends across multiple years. We chose a very unique name that was not trending.

then we moved to our forever home in a new city. The girl next door had the same name. She moved. New neighbor had a daughter with the same name in that house. We got another neighbor nearby, same name. We chose a totally niche name, that people with our financial background, personality for home selection, and age of child-bearing also chose.

I should have known better. My original analysis in no way considered that people don’t choose names at random, they pick them for a reason. Had I been at work, I would have scuttled my own project quickly, but I was blinded by a desire to pick the perfect name.

tldr: even if you pick a unique name, there is a decent chance it won’t be unique within your local community

Not one iota. My name was one of the most popular for most of the decade I was born, and the most popular for a few years. My next door neighbour even had the same name when we were kids.

But from senior school on, I've never had another in my class, or department or even , afaik, employer. I have no friends with the same name, there's no-one called the same anywhere I socialise, no living authors (and I only know of one dead one), one minor TV 'sleb, and one well-known social media bod, who is easily 30 years younger than me. I've met maybe two others in my adult life.

As PPs prove, you can't win so choose a name YOU like/find meaningful and will be managable for your child. Both my DDs have 'classic' names which happen to be outside the 'top 100'. But they are names from our family tree plus are used regularly across all western countries, easy to spell and pronounce in English and a range of continental languages.

@Ponderingwindow , my husband too was a number cruncher. He determined that DD2's name (even with all spellings combined) is only given about 50 times each year: Not even one per county in England! Yet it is a well known name. Coincidentally, there is one girl in her year at school with the same name but she has a slightly different spelling and uses a diminuative so confusion is limited.
Your later realisation about cultural factors is spot on. Names absolutely run in packs. I don't know any Jaydens but I know lots of Oscars. My MIL and my mother have the same name. My sister's MIL had the same middle name as our mum.

It's one which I have no logic for. I gave my children recognisable but not common names. I liked the idea of them being unique but not unheard of. But, I have a name which you'd never find on a mug (disappointing as a child in gift shops), and also used to get very excited when I met someone who had the same (or even close to same!) name as me, so I really couldn't tell you why as a parent I was so keen to avoid that for my own kids.

Ironically I had two names on the final list for both my children and went with the rarer one on both occasions. We've since met a fair few kids with the same name, whereas the more common names which I didn't choose in the end I've not met another child which shares that name.

Still not going to find it on a mug though! And would be surprised if there's another first name last name twin out there for either.

I've heard this a lot at the moment. You might not have the exact same name as someone else in your class but it would follow the same rhythm/pattern as a bunch of others.

For example we know a LOT of girls under the age of 7 who have a 4 letter name ending in A. Nora, Cora, Emma, Anna, Lyra, Luna etc. Then the boys names all seem to end with a 'y/ie' sound...Ronnie, Archie, Finley, Rory, Sidney, Henry, Teddy, Harry etc.

Ellen is not a common name, Ellie is, not heard any Ellen's

Loads of Lily's, Amelia and Olivia's in my demographic, my kids can never get their name on anything in the shops, one has a name you have on your list 😁

Oh and my name is really uncommon and I never could get anything with my name on in shops, it's always spelt or pronounced wrong too, hated it when I was younger, doesn't bother me now though

If I were naming a baby now I'd make sure the dotcom was available. It may sound a bit mad but the reason is that it can be incredibly useful to own yourname.com in this day and age, for a website or just for emails (e.g. firstname @ yourfullname.com). My name isn't madly unusual but I registered the domain in 2001 so got in there before the deluge. My younger half-brother who is called similar to John Smith is really fucked off he can't get his dotcom.

So, if my surname were Smith and I had a baby to name, I'd pick an unusual first name where the dotcom domain wasn't already registered.

Edited to add: and I'd do the same if I had an unusual surname, but the first name might not have to be as unusual!

Everything comes round in cycles too don’t forget. When I named my ds 39 years ago Oliver was unbelievably uncommon. People were saying oh wow where’d you get that from?

We wanted names that couldn’t be abbreviated to something silly and didn’t start with the same initial as either of ours to avoid confusion.

I work in schools, and I met a Simon this week. Very well known name, but very rare at his age.

That's not strictly true. If you look at my age group, the numbers of babies registered with a name (e,g. Sarah, Mark) was probably higher (than e.g. Sophia, Theo) but if you compared them with Sophia+Sofia and Theo+Theodore then probably not.

Also about 20 years ago, Jack and Chloe seemed to be ridiculously popular despite there being lots more names to choose from.

My son has a reasonably common name, yet he was the only child with that name in a primary of 650 children. We then moved to a tiny school with just 3 other boys in his class, two had the same name!
You just never know!

My name is too unusual and it's remarkably easy to find out information about me I'd prefer to keep private.

I’m not saying Ellen is common though, it’s the prevalence of the same type of name - vowel heavy (they’re all E names except 2!), loads of Ls. It was always a relatively unusual name although there were 2 in our year at school (we’re all mid-late 30s).

Just like nowadays there might be one Evie in a class but she’ll be with an Ava, and Ada and an Evelyn.

That’s it, totally.

My kids LOVE finding things with their names on in the shops. You can order stuff these days but nothing like walking in a turning the spinning display of named magnets etc to find your own haha.