L. writes:<\/p>\n
I have a question about name popularity.<\/p>\n
My own name is very unusual, but it is different from a common name by
\nonly one letter. I have spent my life correcting people and spelling
\nmy name out, and it is a PAIN. I would like to choose a classic, easy
\nto spell and easy to pronounce name for my child.<\/p>\nAt the same time, I have wanted to stay away from really common names.
\nI remember all the Sara’s and Sarah’s in college and how they all had
\nto go by their last name. There were even Sara’s rooming with each
\nother! It seemed like a pain. As an adult, I notice all the Chris’s.
\nCombined with the women who are Christina and Kristina and go by
\nChris or Kris, it is downright confusing! They seem to be everywhere
\nand you always have to use a last name.<\/p>\nSo, I started out trying to avoid the top 50 or so popular names in my
\nstate, and it eliminated many of my top choices. In particular, I
\nlove the name the Jack. But Jack, Jackson, and John all top the
\npopularity chart in my State. So, I had nixed the name until I read
\nsomewhere that the top names these days account for a much smaller
\npercentage of babies than they did back when the Chris’s and Sara’s
\nwere born. So, I did the math. In 2012, Jack, Jackson, or John
\naccounted for a total of 131 births out of 12,754 births in my state.
\nSo, only 1% of births. Theoretically, it seems like at that
\npercentage, you would have a small chance of having, say, more than
\none Jack in a kindergarten class. Or, when he grows up, having his
\nelectrician, his boss, and his plumber all also named Jack.<\/p>\nI will admit, that even after doing the math, I do still feel a little
\nbit of “everyone will think I’m so boring for choosing a common name.”
\nBut, I think my happiness over being able to use some of the top
\nnames would override that feeling.<\/p>\nI am curious your thoughts and the thoughts and experiences of your
\nusers r.e. common names.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/p>\n
All four of my boys have Top 50 names. One of them has name that was Top 10 in our state the year he was born; in several school years, he has had one or two other boys with the same name in his classroom—but they are the same boys. That is, it’s not that there are so very many Williams that he’s very likely to have two or three in his class, it’s that there are two other Williams in his same grade who are frequently in the same class with him while other classrooms have zero Williams because his classroom is hogging them all. There were nearly twice as many Jacobs born in our state that same year, and yet he hasn’t had two Jacobs in a classroom.<\/p>\n
My other three boys have names more in the 30s rankings, and so far none of them have ever had a boy with the same name in their classroom.<\/p>\n
I did worry slightly that people would find the names boring—but on the other hand, when I considered less-common names I worried people would find them weird, so I found I worried either way. And what I found after naming all my babies and reacting to all my friends and relatives naming THEIR babies is that hardly anyone really cares what you name your baby. They might have a few seconds of thinking, “Oh, great, ANOTHER _____” or “Wow, that’s pretty unusual!”—but it will be a fleeting reaction, because they don’t deep-down care.<\/p>\n
As you can imagine, I am VERY KEEN to see the class list every year, and usually I have to wait until Valentine’s Day to see it. It is not uncommon to have two children with the same name in a classroom. But it is not uncommon NOT to have any duplicates, either: many class lists come home without a single duplicate. More often there are two children with similar names: a Madison and a Madelyn who both go by Maddy, for example, or a Jaiden and an Aiden, or a Kayla and a Mikayla.<\/p>\n
As you’ve found in your research, the current top baby names are not as common as the top names were when we were growing up. Jennifer, for example, was given to over FOUR PERCENT of baby girls at its peak—that’s FOUR TIMES the number of Jack, Jackson, and John COMBINED for current babies in your state. The name Sarah was a Top 10 name from 1978 until 2002—TWENTY-FIVE CONSECUTIVE YEARS of being in the Top 10! Combined with the spelling Sara (which didn’t hit the Top 10, but was Top 50 from 1976 until 1999), that is a LOT of Sara\/Sarah—especially in settings where the popular sound of the name was made even more appealing by religious significance.<\/p>\n
The only thing that might come close to that today is the -aden name trend (Aiden, Brayden, Caden, Hayden, Jaiden, etc.) or the Maddy\/Addy trend (Madison, Madelyn, Addison, Adelyn, etc.). No single name gets anywhere close.<\/p>\n
And with a traditional choice like John or Jack, popular for generations or even for thousands of years, I don’t think you’ll be sorry: a name that suddenly hits the Top 10 and then ducks right back out is one thing, but an enduringly popular classic is quite another.<\/p>\n
********<\/p>\n
Have you given your child a relatively common name—a name you KNEW was relatively common when you chose it? (It can be quite a different thing to choose a name not knowing it was or would soon be so common.) What has been your experience with that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
L. writes: I have a question about name popularity. My own name is very unusual, but it is different from a common name by only one letter. I have spent my life correcting people and spelling my name out, and it is a PAIN. I would like to choose a classic, easy to spell and […]<\/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-8349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-2aF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8349","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=8349"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8351,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8349\/revisions\/8351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}