Miriel writes:<\/p>\n
Swistle! Help!<\/p>\n
My husband John and I are expecting our first baby at the end of October and we just found out today that it’s a boy! This is very exciting, except that we have absolutely no idea what to name him. (We had a girl name all lined up and ready to go for this baby, whom I was convinced was a girl…of course.)<\/p>\n
Our naming criteria are pretty straightforward:<\/p>\n
1. My first name is very unusual and often misspelled or mispronounced, and our last name is also unusual (spelled Reneau, essentially pronounced reh-NO). I want the baby’s first name, at least, to be pronounceable when read and spellable when heard by the average person.<\/p>\n
2. I tend to like longer boy names, but ones that have built-in nicknames if the child decides he WANTS a nickname. (My name has no natural nicknames. It is a great trial to me.)<\/p>\n
3. We hope to have more children – we’re not sure how many, exactly, but somewhere between a few and a great big bunch – so I don’t want our first to set us on some sort of baby naming track that greatly restricts our options in the future. I think this means (a) nothing too trendy and (b) nothing too outlandish.<\/p>\n
We tend to prefer names that are not gender-ambivalent, and I think our combined preferences tend toward the classic\/old-fashioned end of the spectrum.<\/p>\n
Here are some boy names that I really like, but can’t use for specific reasons (the baby has first cousins by that name, the name has negative personal associations, stuff like that):<\/p>\n
Andrew
\nMatthew
\nDaniel
\nGabriel
\nIsaac
\nHenry
\nEdward<\/p>\nAnd here are some of the names we are currently considering:<\/p>\n
Christopher
\nBenedict
\nGregory<\/p>\n…and that’s pretty much it. Surely there are more options, right?<\/p>\n
Of course we will also need a middle name, though I feel like that won’t be quite so difficult once we have a first name. And I can think of a few middle name options off the top of my head (Francis, as an honor name for my dad, or Thomas, which is my maiden name, or potentially one of the names listed above), and I just feel like a first name is more IMPORTANT.<\/p>\n
Can you help?<\/p>\n
Thanks!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
There was a fun conversation about this on Twitter the other night, and after awhile I was thinking, “Okay, by now I think everything I would have suggested has been suggested”—so I am not sure I will be much help. But let’s try anyway, for the fun of it!<\/p>\n
The category of “long boy names with good nicknames” is shorter than we’d like it to be, but there are SOME. A long boy name can be long in letters or long in syllables; I think of a true long boy name as being long in both, but I’m going to include names with three or more syllables even if they’re on the shorter side letter-wise. I’m also including Gabriel (which you can’t use) and Christopher and Gregory from your list. I’ve taken your tastes into account (though stretched them a bit if a name seemed like a good one to have on this list for reference later on), but I haven’t filtered for your surname.<\/p>\n
Abraham (Abe, Bram)
\nAlexander (Al, Alex, Xan, Xander)
\nAlistair (Al)
\nAnderson (Andy, Anders)
\nAnthony (Tony)
\nAugustus (Auggie, Gus)
\nBenjamin (Ben)
\nCarleton (Carl)
\nCharlton (Charlie)
\nChristopher (Chris)
\nDavison (Dave)
\nDominic (Dom)
\nDonovan (Don)
\nElias (Eli)
\nElijah (Eli)
\nEverett (Rett\/Rhett)
\nEzekiel (Zeke)
\nFinnegan (Finn)
\nFrederick (Fred, Rick)
\nGabriel (Gabe)
\nGregory (Greg)
\nHarrison (Harry)
\nJameson (Jamie, James)
\nJedidiah (Jed)
\nJefferson (Jeff)
\nJeremiah (Jem, Jerry)
\nJeremy (Jem, Jerry)
\nJonathan (Jon)
\nJoshua (Josh)
\nJosiah (Joe)
\nLeander (Lee)
\nMalachi (Mal, Kai)
\nMatthias (Matt)
\nNathaniel (Nate)
\nNicholas (Nick, Cole)
\nNicholson (Nick, Cole)
\nOliver (Ollie)
\nPhineas (Phin\/Finn)
\nRaphael (Raph)
\nRobertson (Rob, Robby)
\nSebastian (Seb, Bas)
\nSolomon (Sol)
\nThaddeus (Thad)
\nTheodore (Theo, Teddy, Ted)
\nTobias (Toby)
\nZachariah (Zach)
\nZachary (Zach)<\/p>\nIf none of these are quite right, one way to get a longer name is to call the child by first and middle. If the child prefers, he can easily drop the middle name later on, making a “nickname” out of his first name. John Louis can later be just John, for example, or Paul Thomas can be just Paul, or Calvin Thomas can be just Calvin\/Cal. This is the kind of idea that I wouldn’t have expected to work well, except that I’ve seen it work well. That is, when I’ve met a child named something like Paul Thomas, I’ve thought, “Hm, that doesn’t seem natural,” and then a couple of weeks later I’m calling him Paul Thomas without even thinking about it and it seems PERFECTLY natural.<\/p>\n
Back to the list. At first I was thinking there were three main paths here:<\/p>\n
1. the Jonathan\/Christopher\/Alexander path
\n2. the Ezekiel\/Jedediah\/Malachi path
\n3. the Theodore\/Augustus\/Sebastian path<\/p>\nBut the more I tried to sort the names into these categories, the more I noticed overlap, and the more I realized that “long name with a good nickname” can be a theme of its own. That is, I still might not pair up Christopher and Jedediah as brother names—but on the other hand, if I picture a big sibling group that contains a Theodore\/Teddy, an Ezekiel\/Zeke, and a Christopher\/Chris, the names go together better because of their name\/nickname set-up than they would if they were, say, August and Judah and Evan. It’s kind of like a shared initial: a shared initial doesn’t fully unite the styles of, say, Josiah and Jayden, but it’s a STEP towards uniting them. In a group with Josiah, Jayden, Jeffery, and Jared, there’s a connection that cancels out some of the style difference. I think the name\/nickname connection has a similar effect.<\/p>\n
Also, I noticed in my own family that as the number of children increased, the expectation of name coordination decreased. When it’s harder for people to think of all the sibling names at once, style differences stand out less. On the other hand, in a larger group, one single name of a different style can stand out more: John and Maverick could be a family-tradition-requirement name and a name of the parents’ own style; John, Edward, Henry, and Maverick feels like someone is excluded from the group.<\/p>\n
For a first child, when you’re not sure what your tastes will be or what the eventual sibling group will look like, I might encouraging erring toward the middle. That is, if you have three names you like equally, and one is very popular and familiar, and one is very unusual and distinctive, and one is both familiar and distinctive, I might go with option 3. This gives you more freedom to adjust either direction on the spectrum for subsequent children. But this is only if you like all the styles equally: if you find you have a strong preference for one of them, and also like names that feel like good sibling names for it, I’d go with that style even if it’s at one of the far ends of the spectrum.<\/p>\n
I’m very drawn to your idea of Gregory. Gregory was in the Top 100 from 1945 until 1996—a nice long stage of popularity, not at all spikey. The few Gregorys I’ve known have all gone by Greg, so using the full form gives it a freshness similar to when kids started going by James and William instead of Jimmy and Billy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Miriel writes: Swistle! Help! My husband John and I are expecting our first baby at the end of October and we just found out today that it’s a boy! This is very exciting, except that we have absolutely no idea what to name him. (We had a girl name all lined up and ready to […]<\/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":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reference"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-2lf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9005","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=9005"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9014,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9005\/revisions\/9014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}