Cara writes:

My wife is pregnant with our first child, and we just found out its a girl! She is due in May. We have narrowed down a short list of first names that we like:

Dorothea
Josephine
Rosemarie
Winifred (Winnie)
Sylvia
Evelyn

I would like to take Evelyn off the list because it’s too high on the popularity list, and I don’t like any of the potential nicknames, but my wife really likes it, so it’s still on there.

For a middle name, we will be using either her father’s name – James, or my father’s name – Thomas. We also like Ross as a middle name – a family name for me and my sister’s middle name.

We’ll be hyphenating her last name, so it will be [snip].

Possible contenders:
Dorothea Thomas
Winifred James
Rosemarie Thomas
Evelyn James
Sylvia Ross

Since a hyphenated last name is kind of weighty, we’re sort of concerned with finding a first/middle name combo that fits well. I love Winifred/Winnie, which was my grandmother’s name. Is that too much name for a little girl? Also we’re concerned that Josephine paired with a male middle name leans too masculine.

We’d also like something with a cute and easy nickname, like Josie for Josephine, or Rosie for Rosemarie. My wife likes the nickname Dor for Dorothea (a character in Middlemarch which I have never read) but neither of us like the nickname Dora for obvious reasons.

Help? Thoughts?

Thanks!

Winifred jumps out to me from your list. It’s underused; it has great flexible nicknames (Winnie, Freddie); it’s a family name.

My second choice is Sylvia. One upside of the name Sylvia is that it’s lighter in sound than Winifred (though no lighter than Winnie), which may help with the issues you mention of having a masculine middle name and a double surname. And Sylvie and Syl are great nicknames.

My third choice (hot on the heels of the first two) is Rosemarie.

I would have put Josephine somewhere in this list too if it weren’t for the male honor name in the middle. It isn’t that the male honor name makes Josephine seem masculine, but more that it draws my attention to it as a feminized version of a man’s name; suddenly the name starts to feel unfairly tipped toward honoring men (even though you’re not honoring a Joseph), especially if the surnames are also from your fathers. (If those are instead your mothers’ surnames, my feelings shift and it seems fine to keep James or Thomas.) I think if those ARE your fathers’ surnames, I’d be inclined to use Josephine with a middle name honoring a woman in your family. Ross might do it, depending on where in the family that name comes from.

I’d add another possibility: Minerva, nickname Minnie.

And Genevieve, nicknames Gen and Genny and Evie.

And Geneva, nicknames Gen/Genny/Evie or Eva or Neevie.

Or Dorothea makes me think of Theodora, which makes it easier to avoid the Dora nickname. I’d use the nickname Thea, and she’d also have Theo if she wanted it.

Let’s have a poll to see what everyone else likes best!

[yop_poll id=”44″]

Name update!

Swistle, thanks so much for answering our question. After much discussion we decided to go in a different direction. We chose two family names. Below is a picture of our baby, Will@ C@therine hyphenated last name.

Laura writes:

Please help. My baby boy is due in March. His daddy is Callum and my name is Laura. We have a very Scottish last name Mac…

His big sister is Rowan Christine. This suited us because the first name is both Scottish and botanical. (Dad was born in Scotland and I’m a treehugger). Her middle name is common in both our families.

I have picked several first names for him. I love them all and cannot decide among them. I would not be disappointed with any of these names:

Alasdair
Bracken
Duncan
Heath
Lachlan
Rannoch

I like the middle name Malcolm because it literally means ‘son of Callum’. However, it does not go with all the names above. James (a family name) might do better with Duncan for example.

Please help me choose.

Thanks!

This is the perfect place for a poll! My own choice would be Heath. I like that it’s a nature name, I like it with your surname, I like it with the sibling name, and I like how easy it is to spell and pronounce. I also think it works with the middle name Malcolm: Heath Malcolm Mac_____.

My runner-up choice would be Lachlan: Celtic and nature as with the name Rowan. I would also love to see the name Alasdair become more common.

Lachlan and Duncan make me think of Declan; I wonder if that would be another possibility.

[yop_poll id=”43″]

Courtney writes:

I really enjoy your site — baby names are a favorite topic of mine! I am the type of person who has had my favorite names chosen since about the age of sixteen. Until I married the love of my life…who happens to have a last name that semi-rhymes with my favorite girl’s name! I haven’t seen this topic tackled on your site, so I thought I’d give it a try.

My name is Courtney, and my husband’s name is John. Our last name sounds like Divine (spelled with an ‘e’ in place of the ‘i.’) We will be trying to conceive in the next several months. If we have a boy, we’ll name him after my husband, whose middle name is Sharp (family name), and call him Jack. However, I am finding that our last name presents some challenges for a girl — only very classic names will go with ‘Divine’ in order to avoid the inevitable ‘that sounds like a stripper name!’ (and yes, I have gotten this quite a few times…) I do love classic names and think this best defines my naming style. I’m not afraid to take a bit of a risk but with our last name, it’s a bit difficult for me.

My favorite girl’s name is Caroline. I absolutely love the name and haven’t found another name that equals it, in my mind. This might be a bit of a stretch, but I also feel that it combines our mothers’ names in a way — which are Karen and Linda. I love the name Karen, but it seems a bit too 1950s to use now. I love names that are traditional, slightly Southern, and very feminine. Vintage is ok — for example, I love a classic name that doesn’t go out of style, but consider a name like Evelyn a little too vintage for me. Catherine is similar and very pretty, but a very close friend just named her baby Catherine. I love the name Grace, but think it might be a little weird (overly religious sounding?) with Divine. I also like the name Claire, which my husband is just ok with. Another name I like is Jane (nn Janie). My husband does not love the vintage names — I haven’t come up with one that he loves yet. An example of a vintage style name that he’s not loving is the name Audrey. His style is a bit more contemporary than mine.

Examples of middle names we could use are Lee (my original middle name and a favorite great aunt’s middle name), Shannon (my current middle name and my maiden name – I don’t care for it as a first name), Virginia (my grandmother’s middle name) and I have also thought about Allison, which is my sister’s name. Mary is also a family name we could use. I am Catholic, so I’d love to include a saint’s name if possible. Since we’d be naming a boy after my husband, we’re looking at my side of the family for a girl. :) John and I aren’t crazy about a lot of our family names, but it would be great to include an honor name of some sort.

I guess my basic question is — is the name ‘Caroline Divine’ annoyingly singsong and rhymey? I love the name Caroline, and so does my husband. It actually is one of the only girl’s names that we’ve agreed upon! Half of me feels like the name sounds like a very sweet, cute girl. The other half says, ‘no one will take her seriously with a rhyming name like that.’ I’d hate to have her teased or pre-judged later in life because of her rhyming name, just because I liked the name so much or couldn’t get on board with something else!

When I’ve asked friends and family, they are about 50-50 on whether or not to use it. What is your opinion? Is Caroline Divine too much? If so, can you recommend some other choices?

Thanks so much!

I have gone back and forth on this for four days now. Sometimes when I say “Caroline Divine,” I think it’s striking and memorable and fine. Other times I think that there are very few rhyming names that don’t sound like stage names: I find myself saying “Caroline…the DIVINE!!” in a circus announcer tone of voice. I think too that it could increase pronunciation issues: if I saw the name Caroline Divine, my first pronunciation attempt would be CaroLYN, because I’d feel silly if I guessed a rhyme where there wasn’t one.

The happy thing, though, is that the adjective divine is a very, very positive one. I can picture people saying, “It’s Caroline….THE DIVINE!!” or “Divine Caroline” pretty often, and I can picture that getting tiresome—but it’s a very different kind of tiresome than “Luke the Puke” or “Cooper-Cooper-Pooper-Scooper.”

I wonder if you’d like Karenna as an updated Karen? Karenna Lin or Karenna Lindy or Karenna Linda would be a pretty way to honor the grandmothers.

Or I wonder if you’d like Josephine: similar in look and style to Caroline, but a non-rhyming ending. A saint name, too.

Another saint option is Genevieve.

Or Winifred.

Margaret Mary Divine is pretty, or Margaret Shannon Divine, or Margaret Courtney Divine.

If you decide not to use Caroline as the first name, I think it would be nice as the middle name: the rhyme would be so much less of an issue there.

Let’s have a poll to see what everyone else thinks about Caroline Divine:

[yop_poll id=”42″]

Update (and photo!) on Baby Girl Rice, Sister to Thomas, Lila, and Audrey!
Update on Baby Boy Billespie-with-a-G, Brother to Aiden and Asher!
Update (and photo!) on Baby Girl Wickland, Sister to Georgia and Nathan!

L. writes:

The sounds of words and sentences has always been very important to me and this has translated to the name search as well.

My favorite rhythm for a name is when the second syllable of the first name corresponds to the first. For example, Amelia Martin.

We are having a baby girl in February and are hoping to find a name that works with our last name, which begins with an “F” and is three syllables. One name that I think works perfectly is Ophelia, but I think it’s off the list due both to its literary associations and potential nicknames.

Can you think of any other multi-syllabic names in which the second syllable is an “F” or a “Ph”?

Thanks so much for your help!

I found myself trying to remember the syllable-dividing rules of elementary school, and partly failing. Tiffany, for example: Is that F-sound in the first syllable or the second? If we were hyphenating it for a line-break, we’d split the two F’s: Tif-fany. So perhaps that means Tiffany has an F-sound in both the first and second syllable. Well, here are some names with an F-sound NEAR the second syllable:

Daphne
Delphine
Epiphany
Memphis
Raffaella
Saphira
Sapphire
Sofia/Sophia/Sophie
Sophronia
Stefania
Stephanie
Symphony
Tiffany

There are also a number of compound name options involving Sophie/a combinations: Sophianna, Sophiella, Sophiemarie. (I was a little surprised not to find an entry for Sophelia.)

I have a soft spot for Sophronia, nicknamed Phronsie in the book series about The Five Little Peppers.

Persephone doesn’t have the ph-sound right where you want it, but I suggest it anyway. I would love to see that name get more common.

Because F is the unvoiced V, I wonder if names with a V would also sound nice to you? Evelyn, Vivian, Ivy, Sylvia, Giovanna, etc.? I suspect, though, that those would not give the effect you’re looking for.

Grace writes:

I’m writing because I’m due with a baby girl set to arrive on May 2, 2014. My husband and I live in the south, and our taste in names I would describe as traditional/Southern/vintage. Our last name rhymes with Nixon, but starts with a D. We have one other child, a boy named Hayden Mansfield. Mansfield was my husband’s grandfather’s first name.

I never imagined we would have such difficulty deciding on a girl’s name. It seems that nearly every first name my husband and I agree upon is wildly popular right now, which is something we’d like to avoid. We also intend to choose from a list of family names for the middle name; these include Catherine and Elizabeth, among others. Our top choices include the following: Olivia Catherine (or Olivia Kate), Emma Catherine (or Emma Kate), Annabel {Middle name not yet decided}, and last but not least Blythe Elizabeth. Other names that we like but have too many friends with daugthers of the same name include Ella, Ava, and Evelyn/Evie. Obviously, Olivia and Emma are very popular right now, which is making me shy away from them. Before finding out I was having a girl, I loved the name Blythe when I heard a childhood friend name her daughter that years ago, but now I’m tending to avoid it because I’m afraid it’s too “out there,” the exact opposite of Olivia and Emma. So, what is your opinion? What do you think of Blythe? Do you think it can be classic, traditional, and Southern, or too risky/strong?

Thank you for your input!

Jillian writes:

We are in desperate search of our unborn baby girl’s middle name. Her first name will be Kinsley and our last name is Babb. She is due to be born early March!

Her brother’s name is Cole Ethan. We loved his name and were sold instantly, but it’s been harder to code the girl name this time around! We didn’t use any family names to name him, so we are thinking of not using any family names for Kinsley. I think she needs a one syllable middle name, but I could be wrong.

We like cute, not too traditional names, but not so over the top trendy.

Some middle names we’ve considered:

Elyse
Sophia
Grace
Rose (my mom wants Rose after her middle name, Rosalie, but I’m not sold)
Isabella (thinking that would be a mouth full)

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

With Kinsley ____ Babb, I like a 2-syllable (especially with the emphasis on the second syllable) or 3-syllable (especially with the emphasis on the second syllable) middle name—though I think the 1-syllable options work, too, and I like Kinsley Rose Babb very much. Kinsley Sophia Babb would be exactly to my tastes. I like Kinsley Elyse Babb for rhythm, but would prefer something without the repeating -lee and -s- sounds.

I also like 4-syllable names with the emphasis on the second syllable: Kinsley Elizabeth, Kinsley Amelia, Kinsley Olivia, Kinsley Victoria.

Do you have any names you would have liked to have used for the first name, but couldn’t because they weren’t great with the surname, or because a friend recently used the name, or because it seemed too common/uncommon for your tastes? Those can make great middle names.

Would you LIKE to use a family name, but you feel like you shouldn’t because you didn’t use one for your son? Even though I like sibling names to coordinate, I do think it’s fine if there are differences of this sort.

What I like to do when choosing a middle name is take a baby name book or the Social Security name list and just skim through it, saying each name with the first and middle, jotting down any names that seem like possibilities. Each person’s list will vary depending on tastes in names and rhythms, but here’s what my list looks like:

Kinsley Adele Babb
Kinsley Aurora Babb
Kinsley Brianna Babb
Kinsley Briella Babb
Kinsley Eleanor Babb
Kinsley Fiona Babb
Kinsley Michaela Babb
Kinsley Noelle Babb
Kinsley Rosella Babb
Kinsley Sabrina Babb
Kinsley Sierra Babb