anything you ever wanted to know about baby names

For your own personal search, dear Gabes, as that little bun finishes baking:
the Baby Name Wizard.
After copious graphs and research, the best part was the end.



How to Name a Baby

The first time a friend of mine had a child, it was intensely jarring.

I’d be living my normal day, and then the thought would hit me—”Matt has a son”—and my whole world would get turned upside down.

Three years and six friend babies later, I’m 32 and have numbed to the whole thing considerably. It’s still weird. But not jarring.

This new phenomenon in my life has introduced several new experiences—things like “having your feelings hurt and losing self-confidence because your friend’s toddler doesn’t like you” and “learning that talking about the baby as a ‘toy’ or a ‘pod’ and commenting on ‘it not having a brain yet’ is less funny to the baby’s parents than it is to you.” But perhaps the most frequent new experience is finding myself in discussions about baby names, both in the form of talking to the impending parents and pressuring them to reveal the candidates, and talking to other friends about the eventual name choices behind the new parents’ back.

(Note: definitely best to keep the name candidates a secret until after the baby’s born—no name will please everyone and other peoples’ opinions really shouldn’t be part of the process for something so personal. And when you announce the name after the baby is born, everyone has to pretend they like it to your face no matter what they think, so you’ll end up feeling like everyone likes it.)

You’d assume that thinking about baby names is a new thing in my life, but I’ve actually had a lifelong fascination with the topic.

My curiosity rose to a whole new level the day I discovered an amazing website called The Baby Name Wizard, and especially their Voyager tool, which lets you plug in a few letters or a whole name and see a visual depiction of its corresponding popularity trends over time. The Voyager is delicious and rents permanent space in my Dark Playground. (Of course, as soon as it was the topic of this post, putting Voyager play time in the Dark Woods for the first time ever, the monkey suddenly wanted to do other things and kept clicking away from the page. But that’s a whole other topic.)

So, for all these reasons, it seemed like the right time for a post about names, trends, and the things expecting parents need to think about as they make this decision.

After many hours on The Baby Name Wizard (and the government’s official name database), here are my thoughts (focusing on the US unless otherwise stated)—

[...] Click on the link below to read the entire article.

And now, many of the most popular baby names are popular with both genders, as if each gender can’t handle the other one innovating without being included.

I know a lot about names right now.I’ll leave you today with this puzzle:

via {wait but why}