This repo contains a short document describing a methodology for naming your American child. I believe there are at least some useful best practices to share that will make your naming experience smoother and more intentional. Hopefully it's also an amusing read.
Whoah, whoah! Hold your horses. You can do whatever you want! But my wife and I named two kids with this plan, it worked out pretty well, and solved some important problems that you might also care about. Let's face it. Most people only do this a few times in their life and so by definition most names are given by relatively inexperienced parents. The world will be a better place if we share what we've learned so I took an afternoon and wrote this up.
We picked our kids names in the mid and late 2000s. At that point in history, it was unavoidable in American culture to look away from what I call "the Emma Problem". In Season 8 (2002) of the TV show Friends, Ross and Rachel gave birth to a child named Emma. The name immediately shot to the top of the naming rankings. Within a few years, every kindergarten in America was full of Emmas. This was not a subtle change and almost 1% of all girls have been named Emma ever since with Emma being in the top 3 names for girls to this very day (2023). One of the primary goals of a name is to distinguish your child from other children and every Emma under the age of 21 in America must append a last initial in almost any school or work context. If you are the type of person who gets naming advice from a GitHub repo, you've probably come across the so-called Birthday Paradox. As a reminder, there is a greater than 50% chance that a class with 23 people in it will have at least one shared birthday. 1/365 is equal to 0.2%. The number of students named Emma in an average school population is AT LEAST double that based on government data.
My wife grew up as a child of immigrants with a name from her family's culture (Thai). On the one hand, that name is beautiful and a representation of her heritage. No arguments on that from this white guy and parent of biracial children, I promise. On the other hand, my wife swore on the day that we found out she was pregnant that she would not subject any child of hers to the neverending and daily inconvenience that is her name. What's wrong with her name? Nothing at all! But as I explain in extreme detail in my other repo about how to pronounce names for English speakers, people just don't know what to make of it. People pronounce it correctly about 10% of the time, and the other 90% is split across a bunch of variants and it's just a mess. It's only three letters long, J-U-M. As her brother used to say when he was a mischevious young boy, "it rhymes with Dumb". My wife also had the unique experience of growing up with her brother who also has a beautiful name from her family's culture. His name is "Jon". The differences in experience growing up here was obvious. Both of our kids have Thai middle names. We applied the selection process to those too, and I'll add that into the appendix.
Up until the year 2005, my name was mildly annoying. Even though I don't think I've ever met someone with the last name Carroll spelled any other way, I think people spell it correctly when they hear it pronounced less than 50% of the time. I got into the habit of introducing myself to hotel clerks as Steve Carroll, 2 Rs, 2Ls. This was totally fine, and a minor annoyance at best. In 2005, The Office debuted and the film The 40 Year Old Virgin debuted. Suddenly, there were even more letters in my name that were up for dispute. Now, I'm not going to change my last name because of this, but you, future parent, have the ability to pick a first name with a clean bidirectional mapping from sound to spelling. Use this power wisely.
- Get Pregnant: Congrats! You and your spouse just found out you have a baby to name. You have a few months to get it done. It's time to start a list of names!
- Listen and assemble: There are names all around you. This is the unfiltered and fun part of the process. If you or your spouse like a name, add it to the list. We got a lot of names from old movies and my wife picked some names from literature. Our lists ended up being about 30 names long by the time we started filtering close to the expected birth date. More is better as you'll see and so I recommend that no one vetos any names yet.
- Filter with SSN Data: When the due date is in sight, it is time to do the technology part of this system and begin the filtering. The Social Security Adminstration publishes historical data on name popularity. Navigate to their website, https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/. This website has been up for many many years and I hope it will be up for many more. It is time to make another decision. What is the highest ranking you are going to allow to stay on the list? Since we were planning on having a human child with the modal number of fingers, we picked 100. Because of the dangers of the human mind, I recommend you pick the number first before checking the name popularities to prevent yourself from changing the number when your favorite name gets filtered. Remember our goal in this process is to stop you from naming your kid the same name as everyone else. Keep your eye on the prize! Emma must go.
- Check for spelling: The next step requires a little finesse and judgment. You probably want to take a look at the names with low rankings and make some judgment calls. Because of the modal 10 finger thing, we picked 1000. If a name is very rare, this is the time to investigate whether or not it has a bidirectional sound <-> spelling mapping. Ideally you want to take any suspect names and see if people can spell it. In all honesty, this is where we screwed up our own process. I'm intentionally leaving my kids names out of this for privacy reasons, but let's just say we were 100% confident that people would recognize our youngest daughter's name because it shows up as a character in a very famous TV show and we were right about this. But, we only learned a few weeks after birth that normal people cannot spell it. Do not skip this step if you care about people spelling your kid's name correctly. As discussed above, even if you want to do a heritage name, there are probably many beautiful heritage names for your culture that average Americans can spell.
- Prep for hospital: Print out the trimmed list and put it and a pencil in your "go bag" for the hospital. This is a solemn ritual and the Notes app on your phone just doesn't cut it for me. If the name list is too short (again, maybe 10?), consider adding more filtered names to the list.
- Give birth, or support spouse in giving birth (my pep talks are legendary).
- The Reading of the Names: Hold the baby up like Baby Simba in the Lion King. Read each name on the filtered list while gazing on the child for fit.
- Culling: Now, each parent can veto any name for any reason. Scratch them out. Each parent should eliminate at least one name in each round.
- Iterate: Have you landed on a consensus choice after vetos? If not, return to the Reading of the (remaining) Names and repeat the elimination of the names until a name emerges victorious.
- Break Deadlock: What if two names are left, and the parents are deadlocked? Well, you have many more parenting decisions to reach consensus on and this is probably a good low stakes place to practice that since both of the remaining names are going to be pretty good after all that filtering we did. In a pinch, you can tag me on Twitter (@ScareAll) and I'll break the tie.
What about family names? Thurston Howell IV? If you are happy, I'm happy.
You said you were happy with your kids' names but won't tell us what they are. What were their ranks? According to the SSN site, older daughter was in the 300s, younger daughter was in the 700s. There are a few other kids in the school with those names, but they've never had an "Emma" problem. Of course, they still suffer from an unspellable last name, but them's the breaks.
Wait so what did you do about heritage names for your family? Thai people all have nicknames which is what most people call them (J-U-M is my wife's nickname, not her actual first name, which is also unprounceable and unspellable by average Americans). Thai families tend to pick a theme for the nicknames which adds more constraints. As you can see above, my wife and her brother have names that start with 'J' in both the English and Thai alphabets. We made these nicknames their legal middle names and my wife's parents helped generate easy to spell, easy to pronounce names. My wife and her family calls our kids by their Thai names, I call them by their English names. Everybody in the story feels validated and happy. Find a path that works for you and your family and remember I'm just a guy on the internet.