The Name Game

By far the leading question so far about the pregnancy, even beating out gender, is about what our leading contenders are for names. It's a hard question to answer, especially since everyone has strong opinions. Quite the loaded topic! This week at the Brown dinner, our friend Stacy showed us the best baby name website.



It has the cleverest way of graphing name popularity over time. You can search for specific names, and it updates the page as you type (for the screenshot above, I’d typed an S so that we could see that nice peak in Susans in the 1950s, but as you keep going it shows all names and variants that made the top 1000 since the late 1800s). You can narrow down to boy or girl names, and if you mouse over the graph it shows you the name’s rank by decade. You can click on names for more information. It’s an incredibly fun thing to play with.

For a flat list of popular names, the best (no-nonsense, ad-free) option is the SSA site. This one lists popular names and the various spellings (though I can't decide if that's helpful or annoying).

And, no, we don't have a name yet, or even a list of favourites. We gave ourselves a reprieve on even considering names until we had the 20 week ultrasound. Now that we know it's a boy, we don’t have any strong opinions yet but it’s definitely a topic of conversation. :-)