Henry (age 7) was telling me about an idea he’d had for a video game, and he said the main guy’s name was Zade, or maybe he said Zane. “Did you say Zade?,” I clarified, zeroing in on the part of the story that interested me most. “Yes,” he said, “Because Jade is a girl name.” I said I’d been checking to see if he’d said Zane, and he said with a laugh, “Zane?? Zane is a SIDEKICK name!”<\/p>\n
It’s common for parents to say they’ve loved a name ever since they were a child. And it’s common for parents to say that they accidentally used a name for a pet and now wish they could use it for a baby. I wonder if there is any information about the next generation’s naming preferences to be found in what the current children\/teenagers are naming their toys and story characters.<\/p>\n
When I was still in college, I adopted two cats. I named them George and Oliver: names that seemed to me like perfect pet names, because they were whimsical and appealing but clearly not names I’d want to use for real children. A decade or so later, I was wishing I hadn’t wasted those excellent baby names on cats. When names are coming in but are not quite in, it’s common to see them first on animals: all those pets named Max and Sam and Jack right before the “appealing one-syllable old-man names” style hit.<\/p>\n
Elizabeth (age 9) favors -bert names. She has toy animals named Herbert, Albert, Filbert. But I liked that kind of name too as a child: they seemed funny. And yet those weren’t an accurate prediction of names to come in my generation of parents. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the -bert names for the next generation, though.<\/p>\n
When she was younger, around age 3, she thought her new baby cousin should be named Windiest, the most beautiful name of all.<\/p>\n
My eldest, when he was younger, kept wanting us to name a baby Plum.<\/p>\n
My friend’s teenaged daughter named their dog Zola.<\/p>\n
As a child, I named a doll Megan, but that was an on-trend choice rather than a predictive one. I named another doll Jeanette Isabella for the Christmas carol; years later, I changed her name to Nina. I thought the most beautiful name I’d ever heard was Stephanie; again, on-trend rather than predictive. But I also named goldfish Cleo and Milo and Theo, and I named snails Simon and Silas. Names that seemed quirky enough for pets back then, but now seem perfect for babies.<\/p>\n
The name Zade isn’t unheard-of (61 new baby boys given the name in 2013), but it’s very unusual: Henry hasn’t encountered it anywhere, and thinks he invented it. It shares one of the dominant sounds in the recently-popular -aden names, but is an offshoot rather than belonging to that group.<\/p>\n
If you have children or spend time around children, what names have you noticed them favoring? Names such as Fluffy or Butterscotch won’t give us any information, but what about the others? Which names are they using that are currently in style, and which are they using that aren’t, and which names do they think they’re inventing?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Henry (age 7) was telling me about an idea he’d had for a video game, and he said the main guy’s name was Zade, or maybe he said Zane. “Did you say Zade?,” I clarified, zeroing in on the part of the story that interested me most. “Yes,” he said, “Because Jade is a girl […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-2UD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11199"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11208,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11199\/revisions\/11208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}