Are you looking for a great baby name that’s virtually undiscovered?
I don’t mean one of those hipster choices vibrating just below the Top 1000, ready to make its leap toward baby name stardom: Pearl, Juniper, Theo, Lionel, I’m talking about you. Those names are already used by a couple hundred style-conscious parents a year, and will soon be showing up on a popularity list (or at least a celebrity baby) near you.
Rather, what I have in mind, and what you may too, is a name with a genuine provenance (as opposed to a jury-rigged Lizzeth or Zhane), that is attractive (sorry, Ethel) and feels contemporary (bye-bye, Ethelred), yet is used for only a handful of babies each year.
To ferret out these rare and wonderful names, I unzipped the massive Social Security file of names used for at least five children every year stretching back to 1880 and posted the most recent results on nameberry, complete with the number of babies who received each name.
This is a trove of information for name nerds as well as for parents looking to gauge exactly how many other Sloanes their little girl is likely to meet in kindergarten (short answer: too many). Trouble is, there’s almost too much information here: more than 20,000 girls’ names and nearly 15,000 for boys for 2009 alone. And the further down you go on the list, the more choices you get—25,000 of those names were used for 25 or fewer babies—and so the harder it is to pick out the diamonds from the grit.
Let’s talk about the grit for a minute. Most of what’s on the long tail of the master baby names list falls into three categories:
• “Yooneek” spellings meant to make ordinary names special: Tatumn, Lileigh, Axcel, Wyitt.
• Invented names meant to improve on the thousands already in the lexicon: Wimberley, Mekhai, Shreyan, Imunique.
• Words, places, and surnames used as first names. This is where working your way through all that chaff gets fun. Who’s got it worse, I wondered: the boys named Hung or those named Eh? (Scarily, there were 10 of each.) Were names like Notorious and Clever, Beautifull and Naturell self-fulfilling prophecies? Would Wrigley ever meet Fenway, Dusty be disturbed by Breezy, Sparkle click glasses with Champagne?
But there are some jewels in there too. I sifted through the 25,000 names used for 25 or fewer babies in 2009 and came up with 100 fantastic choices, 50 for each gender. Here, my picks:
FOR GIRLS:
1. Amabel 2. Ambrosia 3. Augustina 4. Bellamy 5. Blanche 6. Branwen 7. Caia 8. Celestia 9. Cicely 10. Circe 11. Clementina 12. Clio 13. Cornelia 14. Dolly 15. Domino 16. Electra 17. Elspeth 18. Federica 19. Finola 20. Fleur 21. Franny 22. Henrietta 23. Honora 24. Ione 25. Isolde 26. Jacinta 27. Jezebel 28. Kiernan 29. Lake 30. Leonie 31. Lilou 32. Lucienne 33. Lux 34. Olympia 35. Ondine 36. Paz 37. Pippa 38. Sabra 39. Saffron 40. Saskia 41. Sinead 42. Snow 43. Tamsin 44. Tanaquil 45. Tansy 46. Toril 47. Tulip 48. Valentine 49. Verena 50. Vita
FOR BOYS
1. Ahmet 2. Amias 3. Balthazar 4. Barnabas 5. Birch 6. Breccan 7. Brick 8. Calloway 9. Cashel 10. Casimir 11. Clancy 12. Cosmo 13. Day 14. Fergus 15. Griffith 16. Guthrie 17. Hamish 18. Hart 19. Inigo 20. Jago 21. Jedediah 22. Jotham 23. Kermit 24. Laird 25. Lorcan 26. Malachy 27. Maxfield 28. North 29. Oberon 30. Ogden 31. Orson 32. Osborne 33. Oswald 34. Ozias 35. Pike 36. Prescott 37. Raoul 38. Redmond 39. Romulus 40. Rufus 41. Serge 42. Stellan 43. Thornton 44. Tiberius 45. Tobiah 46. Vaughan 47. Walden 48. Ward 49. Webster 50. Win
Pamela Redmond Satran is the author of four novels about New Jersey housewives, including Suburbanistas and Babes in Captivity. She is also the developer of nameberry.com.