I’m 14 weeks pregnant with our 2nd child and starting to think about names seriously now. Boy or Girl we do not know, but will in about 6 weeks. We are pretty set on a boy name. Lucas James (James is DH’s name) If its not Lucas (Luke) then our 2nd choice is William (Will, I love Will, but then I would have a Will & Kate??). Our DD’s name is Kaitlyn Elizabeth (which I do not love Kaitlyn) most people call her Kate, Katie or Katie Beth. What do you think of having the same ending for a girl name? Madelyn (Maddie), Emmalyn, etc? I love simple middle names like Rose, Jo & Claire<\/p>\n
Any suggestions would be great.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nTwo interesting questions here: (1) Do we think Will and Kate are still usable as sibling names, and (2) How do we feel about matching endings? I’ll give my own answers, but I think opinions will be all over the spectrum on these—from “AAAAAAA NO NEVER!!” to “What’s the big deal?”<\/p>\n
I would not use Will and Kate as sibling names. Other sibling pairings that would be off my list: Charles and Diana, Brad and Angelina, my mom’s name and my dad’s name. Some two-name sets are so well known for belonging to a particular couple, hearing them together on siblings is highly evocative and sometimes even a little disturbing. (I remember, back when I was looking for names for my twins, finding a comment by a woman who said she’d named her boy-girl twins Romeo and Juliet. Oh…dear.)<\/p>\n
But on this issue I can see how someone else might say that Will and Kate are both classic\/traditional\/popular names and there’s no reason to reject them just because some couple is currently in the news (and in the case of some celebrity couples, might not be anymore by the time the child is in school). Some people might even say “Will and Kate? Who are they?” And certainly I would use Will and Kate before I’d use Romeo and Juliet. It helps that your Kate is short for Katelyn not Catherine, and that the order would more often be Kate and Will.<\/p>\n
And there are plenty of couples whose names don’t immediately trigger an association for me (er, at least when they’re not all together in a list like this): John and Kelly, Sarah and Matthew, Michael and Catherine*, so clearly it’s a complicated equation with many personal-association and particular-name elements. In short: while I wouldn’t use Will and Kate for siblings, I WOULD use Michael and Catherine, and I probably would use my grandmother’s name and my grandfather’s name—so it wouldn’t surprise me to find plenty of people who would use Will and Kate. It also helps if there are more than just two siblings, and if the names are separated by a sibling: Kate, Henry, Meg, and Will is far less of an issue. But I suggest avoiding the whole issue and sticking with Lucas.<\/p>\n
Matching-endings is another area where I’d generally avoid it, but there are plenty of people who do it on purpose—so it’s not anything clear-cut. If my top two favorite girl names were Katelyn and Madelyn, I might use them (especially if I planned to call them Kate and Maddy)—but I think I’d be more likely to change the spellings to avoid at least the visual element of the match: Caitlin and Madelyn, or Katelyn and Madeline. (It’s too bad that the -lyn has already been used for Katelyn, because I really like the way the -lyn ending clears up the pronunciation question of the names Madeline and Emmaline.)<\/p>\n
In short: I’d prefer to avoid repeating endings, but if I loved the names and couldn’t think of any I liked better, I might go ahead and use them—changing spelling if possible.<\/p>\n
********<\/p>\n
What do you think? Would you use Will and Kate as sibling names? Would you repeat a name ending?<\/p>\n
In fact, let’s add polls, because polls are fun. There’s one for each question, and they’re over to the right. The “it depends” option is for things like “If Kate were short for Katelyn, but not if it were short for Catherine” and “Not this year with all the fuss, but maybe a few years down the road” and “Only if I planned to use nicknames that were less similar.” [Polls closed; see results below.]<\/p>\n
*Travolta, Jessica Parker and Broderick, Douglas and Zeta-Jones<\/p>\n
![\"WillKate\"](\"http:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/WillKate.png\")
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Elizabeth writes: I’m 14 weeks pregnant with our 2nd child and starting to think about names seriously now. Boy or Girl we do not know, but will in about 6 weeks. We are pretty set on a boy name. Lucas James (James is DH’s name) If its not Lucas (Luke) then our 2nd choice is […]<\/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-6294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-1Dw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6294","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=6294"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9775,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6294\/revisions\/9775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}