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Baby names are obviously a perennial parenting topic, but in all of our discussions about names we’ve never just point-blank asked: what are you favorite unique baby names?
Is your kid’s name a combination of family names handed down through generations? Something you pulled from your favorite book or movie? A name you totally made up? Or does your kid have one name — but you secretly love a totally off-the-wall name? (I knew someone who wanted to name her kid Saturn but went with a much more traditional name.)
Scroll through the comments on this open thread to find out: What are your favorite unique baby names?
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I have 4 children and think I did a pretty good job on their names:
Conner Ashe- Unfortunately, his name became pretty common after a while but I enjoy that it means wisdom and Ashe was after the Ash tree which was sacred to the druids.
Arianna Lane- Arianna is a combonation of my beloved grandmother’s first name(Mary) and my mother’s middle name(Anne). I gave her my middle name.
Trent Morrison- Named after our favorite rock stars, Trent Reznor and Jim Morrison. Boy does he act like a rock star sometimes…lol.
Last but not least…
Draven Godric- Named after the main character in The Crow graphic novel and our favorite character in True Blood. Draven also means Avenger of Love and he happens to be a little Libra, so I think it suits him well!
My son is named Trent as well. I definitely think there’s something to the name because he also acts like a rock star most of the time.
We named our son “Clive”. My husband and I both love the author C.S. Lewis (Clive Staples Lewis) and it fits our son really well. His middle name is “Arthur”.
I’ve always wanted to name my son (if I ever have children) Imriel, after a character from one of my favorite books. Its an old Hebrew name that means “the eloquence of God”, and I love it. A bit less offbeat is Zacariah, which is also Hebrew, meaning “God has remembered.” I’m in no way religious, but I love the names. For a daughter, Anjulie is my number one. Its a Sanskrit word meaning “gift”, and I fell in love with it when I first read it. My second choice is the ever popular Zoe, which is Greek for life. But I haven’t decided yet. My name is a bit off beat, so I want my kids to follow the same tradition. They will also have Chinese middle names, just as my brothers and I do, as a nod to our Chinese heritage from my mom’s side. My last name is awesomely Dutch (dad), and hopefully whoever I marry will be willing to take it because its a great name that matches my personality!
RE Anjulie: The name seems to be a very interesting transliteration of the name “Anjali”. While it’s technically correct, I think a lot of Indians will wonder why your child’s name is spelled wrong.
My daughters name is Ellison Poe, and I’m currently preggo with baby 2, a boy. If he had been a she, the name woulda been emery or Marlowe scout, but I’m having a harder time with boys names. So far, the leading contenders are Sullivan (Sully) and Ozias (Ozzy), middle name likely Twain to continue my author theme.
My eldest daughter is Hunter Rosemary, named after Hunter S Thompson and my favorite herb. We usually call her Hunter Rose. My other daughter is named Rowan Lynda (for the tree, and my husband’s favorite auntie)
I have a middle school student named Möbius, which is a pretty awesome name.
Those are beautiful names!
I love “offbeat” names. My husband and I have such common names (Mark and Ashly), so we knew that our children MUST have different names. I started thinking about names as soon as I found out I was pregnant. I went through many different combinations before I found the perfect ones for each of them. Our ten year old is Trent Aiden and our newest addition, 4 months old, is Acheron Elijah. Our first born was named after Trent Reznor of NIN and our second was named after my favorite character in Sherilyn Kenyon’s Dark Hunters series of books.
My fiance’s and I’s imaginary kid’s names are Antigone (from Shakespeare) and Jeroth (the goblin king). Keeping with the accidental character theme, I also really like Morgana (and Azula, even though she was an evil character!)
I’ve always adored the names Marceline, Odette and Arly for girls. I love Ryker and Tallon for a boy.
But my all time favorite boy name will be Ciel (pronounced sea-ell) from the anime black butler. I’m strongly considering it if I ever pop out boy.
Wow I’ve never met anyone else who watches black butler!
Also Ciel is a beautiful name.
My daughter is named Juniper Teagan and my son is Pyrus (greek for pear tree) Nikolai. If we ever have another child, f it’s a girl, her name would be Goldenrod Aurelia and for a boy, we like Hawthorn Otis.
Other names we like:
GIRLS
Verbena Boheme
Fig Bedelia
Chrysanthemum Harper
Foxglove Matilda
Snowdrop, Rosemint, Sweetbrier (haven’t thought of any middles)
Elm Imogen
BOYS
Carnelian Ptolemy
Huckleberry Iver
Sol Orville
Arum Theodore
Hickory and Moss
My son’s name is Felyx Turbo. I’ve always wanted all of my children to have names with Y’s in them. Our last name starts with W, so my husband and I decided to give him a middle name that starts with T so his initials would be FTW. 🙂 I’m pregnant with our 2nd right now. If this baby is a girl her name will be Faye Shadow. We haven’t found a boy name we like yet.
I should probably also mention that my husband is an aerospace engineer with an obsession with things like jet engines and turbochargers, hence the middle name Turbo, which completely suits my son’s temperament.
It was recently brought to my attention that there are two uses for FTW… F*** the world (as I’ve always known it) and For The Win (literally just found out about this 6 months ago and now all those instagram hashtags make so much more sense… what can I say, I grew up with bikers not gamers)… I’m assuming this is meant to be For The Win, so that’s adorable (and/or bad-ass if it is the other meaning). 🙂
We plan on adopting older kids (age 7+), so the odds of us naming any children are low. Which has lead to my partner to entertain more unusual names than he might have otherwise. 😛
My picks:
Danika Jade, Dani for short (after my cousin and one of my favorite heroines from Amelia Atwater-Rhodes Keisha’ra series, not the race car driver :P)
Elizabet
Mei
Chrysanthemum, Chrys/Chryssy or Anthy for short
Atom, could go by Tom
Xavier (Ex-ay-vier, not Zay-vier)
Iason (Yay-son)
His picks:
Sarah Ripley (after Sarah Connor from Terminator and Ripley from Aliens)
Vash Nicholas (Trigun)
My friends have a tendency to make fun of the names my husband and I choose, mainly because of the length. Our last name is 12 letters long and not of European origin, which apparently makes names like “Siddhartha Benjamin B———-a” or “Anandini Rosalind B———-a” some kind of bad parenting choice.
I figure that there are plenty of people out there with long, complicated names and they’re all doing just fine. Teachers will have trouble with our kids’ last names anyway, so why not give them names that we’re passionate about?
My son is Zia William Jacon B——-. It’s incredibly long and we got a lot of crap about in the beginning, especially from my mom. In the end we decided the amount of f**** we give was none. Our kid, our name choice. Deal with it.
Just go with the names you love. We got Zia from wristcutters… I have loved the name since I heard it. William after my partner’s father and Jacob from my best friend. We only forsaw ourselves having this one child together, and wanted to use all the good, meaningful names in one go. 🙂
That’s what my husband and I decided. We’ve decided that we’re just going to name our kids what we like and our friends will deal with it. Most of my family members think that it could’ve been worse- we could have hyphenated our name. Adding my 7-letter maiden name with our 12-letter last name really *would* have been cruel. 😛
My full name is Aimee L—– L- – H- (12 letters and a hyphen in the last name). My parents had to fight for the hyphenated last name, and people gave them a bunch of crap. I absolutely love my name and wouldn’t change it for something shorter. All of my irritations related to the name have been from people’s attitudes towards it/lack of space for the name, not from the name itself. Definitely screw the idea that a long name is a “bad parenting choice”.
We named our daughter Siren, for three reasons:
1.) We want all our female children to have strong, empowering names.
2.) We’re huge Vonnegut fans; therefore, The Sirens of Titan.
3.) We want her to grow up and kill sailors.
Her middle name is after one of our best friends, who is herself definitely a siren.
For our other girls, we’d like Charlotte Hazard (for Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as well as Charlotte from The Hazards of Love) and Carlotta Danger (for the song “Carlotta Valdez” by Harvey Danger). I’d like to throw a Florence in the mix, for my grandmother, but wouldn’t know how to pair it.
Our boy’s names will be mostly familial, and there’re a lot of offbeat male names on both sides of our family. However, there will be one exception: one of our sons is getting named David, after my father. Who’s “offbeat” now, eh?
My daughter’s name is Oona Faye, which just barely beat out Nova and Lyric Lachlan. We’ll definitely keep those in mind for more little ones down the road, but my husband also happens to have a beautiful family name [his Grandmother’s maiden name] which is Heroux. Pronounced like “ee-roo’. I would love to use it for a first or middle name someday. 🙂 My name is Bryn-Erin and I’ve always loved that it’s a bit offbeat. I’ve yet to meet another Bryn in person!
For my husband and I, naming our first child was agonizing! We wanted to be a little original, but not too far out there for the sake of our kid. My husband loved Siobhan but only that spelling, and I couldn’t do that to my child. I work with a Sorcha and an Enda (both from Ireland, living in Denver) so I saw first hand how Irish names get butchered. Plus, I thought it would be hard to explain to my non-Irish family. Thinking back, I wish I hadn’t worried about that as much. Also, while our last name isn’t difficult, it is a little odd (Organ) so we had to be careful not to use a name that sounded like a descriptor. For example, I loved Olive, but Olive Organ… not so much (see also Rosie, June, Ophelia, and our favorite boy name Rex – I was too afraid that at some point some child would realize that Rex rhymes with Sex, and as awesome as my husband thinks the name Sex Organ is… No). We had a few contenders for girls names: Annabell, Stella, Nora and none (besides the vetoed Rex) for boys. Thankfully, we had a girl and we ended up naming her Eleanor so that we could call her Nora, but she would have other options if she hated Nora as she got older. Having a really hard time coming up with name for baby #2 though… Annabell and Oliver are top contenders since they both fit well with Eleanor and our over-all aesthetic, but to be honest, we really aren’t excited about either name. I’ll have to monitor this forum in hopes that something jumps out in the next few months!
Our first child is named Zoe Elizabeth. If we had a son, he would have taken my husband’s first name as his middle name, so we figured that it should work for our daughter as well. Her last name starts with an “N” so her initials are ZEN. While we didn’t do that on purpose, it is a nice coincidence! Our second child is Isla Anne, pronounced eye-la. We wanted something that would complement Zoe. My only regret is that no one pronounces her name correctly…ever. That being said, I love her name. We’ve had a difficult time coming up with boy names. We didn’t have a boy name for our first since we found out she was a she. We didn’t find out for our second and we were leaning towards Killian. Although, now if we have a third we’d likely go with Leif. I’d love to name a daughter Hazel, after my maternal grandmother. However, she hated her name and threatened my Mom with naming any children after her.
My name is Leslie… 20 years ago it was a very unusual name. Not so much now.
My daughter’s name (who is 12) is Meegan (Like Megan with a long E sound).
My son’s name is Zia (pronounced like the car Kia with a Z) from the movie Wristcutters. People ask us where we got the name all the time… we just tell them we found it in our baby book (which it was there, too). I guess it’s a bad omen to name your child after a person or character that commits suicide. I don’t believe in that stuff…
Atticus and Icarus were both close contenders.
My brother’s son is Orion (like the constellation).
I’m partial to my daughter’s name (Maci, pronounced with a short A, Mah-see instead of May-see) which is a nickname to Maria Lucia.
We wanted to give her a recognizable legal name, and a nickname that is uniquely hers. To this day, I’ve never met anyone with her same nickname… even though pronounciation is an issue, and more often than not people think her name is pronounced like the department store!
We plan on doing the unique nickname + recognizable legal name for all our future kids; BUT I also love names that are also nouns.
My son is Silas Arlo, Si for short. I love his name, even though we got some discouraging comments from family members when we were shopping it around while pregnant (ahem, ahem, I’m lookin at you MIL!) And do I care that Si Robertson of Duck Dynasty became famous shortly after my son was born and that a handful of people have asked if we named him after him? Not at all. Si Robertson is awesome, and that’s a fact JACK! But seriously, we did not name him after Si Robertson.
My daughter’s name is Vada (vay-da). I love Enoch (ee-knock) for a boy.
I really like the name Evelyn for a boy but I think he would get picked on a bit too much. My other choices for a boy are Walter or Blythe. For a girl, I like Mary Elizabeth or Lavinia Catherine or Sybil Claire. Hester is also a favorite but not as much as the other ones.
Girl:Nora Lynn- Nora because it sounds old fashioned but modern at the same time and Lynn bc this is my mothers name. My husband and I like the idea of nicknames, and my husband came up with Anorable, kinda like adorable 🙂
Boy:Jaxson Ray- Jaxson-mainly bc my husband and I loved the spelling, wanted a J first name for the boy and wanted to be able to have a nick name for this name as well: Jax. Ray is my husbands middle name.
A name came to me in a daydream once, & though I love it, I have since fallen for other names more- but I would love to see someone name a girl Reverie. Throwing it out there into the world hopefully to inspire someone else!
The author of the blog “Girl’s Gone Child” does in fact have a little girl named Reverie. Her other children are named Archer, Fable, and Boheme. So dreamy and awesome! Look it up, she’s a pretty offbeat mama too.
I’m 12 weeks along so it’s still early for my husband and me to know what we’re having, but we’re both pretty convinced we’re having a girl. Which is almost too bad since we both absolutely agree on a boy name: Max.
The girl names, however . . . not so much. Poet is one of my favorites but my husband isn’t quite on board for that one. I also like Lucy (after “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”–I’m a big Beatles fan) but I keep feeling pulled toward Poet. Who knows, maybe I can work on him a bit. We’ve got time 🙂
Or we’ll get lucky and find out we’re having a boy and the name dilemma will be over! Haha
My sons are Skylar and Eben- pronounced like Ebenezer.