Baby names

OK, before you go ahead and proudly name your first born after yourself, you might want think about being a bit more creative and consider any one of literally thousands of names that are knocking about. Naming your newborn, or soon to be born son or daughter is one of the fun parts of parenthood and no doubt something you, and your wife or partner have given thought to ever since you were teenagers.

View top 100 British boys names
View top 100 British girls names

Before you get carried away with gems like ‘heavenly haraani tiger lily’ or settle on something common like Michael or John you might want to think about a few important considerations. Afterall you might indulge yourself with your favourite fashionable name but your offspring is the poor thing that’s got to wander around explaining it to people and putting up with misspellings for the rest of their life.

Remember, naming a child is one of the truly important privileges each of us get but it is not our choice alone, and often a compromise is necessary to reach an agreement with your partner who would’ve also had her heart set on something she things sounds nice. From the start it’s safer to concede that you might not get to use that name you’ve always wanted for your ‘son and air’, so come up with a few which you can add to your partner’s shortlist and between you you can settle on something that both of you like.

It’s worth considering these points first;

• Names come and go out of fashion. Just when you thought you’d come up with a nice ‘different’ name you heard somewhere, you turn up with your child on his first day at school and discover half a dozen others have the same name.
• It’s nice to consider the actual meaning of the name and whether it matches your hopes for their character. There are plenty of websites with full details and origins of the name variations.
• If it’s an unusual name is it likely to draw too much attention and teasing at school, particularly for young boys who can be the subject of some cruel teasing. If it is a name of foreign origin does it sound too much like something derogatory in English?
• Don’t go for something too outrageous or long, like Bob Geldof and other celebs tend to do, the name will simply be shortened when people realise how impractical it is.
• Many names tend to get abbreviated unintentionally at school, and this might not be what you had in mind, for example Daniel often becomes Dan, Andrew becomes Andy, Anthony becomes Tony and so on, often with different initials which cause confusion.
• If you have a surname with a single syllable it sounds better when you opt for a first name of more than one syllable and vice versa so that it’s rolls off the tongue in three or four easy syllables.
• Some names have various spellings and this is bound to cause a bit of confusion especially with sex-ambiguous names like Ashley, Jude, Joe/Jo, Tracy/Tracey or Alexandra.

Here are a number of very handy sites that list thousands of names with their meanings, variations and origins. It could take days to get through.

123-baby-names.com

www.babycenter.com/babyname

www.baby-names.co.uk

www.statistics.gov.uk

There are various published lists on top names, some more specific either side of the Atlantic. We compared several and found them to be quite similar with slightly differing ranking orders. However, here is the official top 100 in the UK based on statistics from the Home Office.

Top 100 Boys names in the UK (2005)

Top 100 girls names in the UK in 2005

The pregnancy
Preparing for the birth
Registering the birth