List of old family names, plus any we liked.
Removed any we disliked, even for trivial reasons.
Practiced saying them out loud. Could we yell it? Could they be introduced in serious society with it?
Was it the popular name recently?
Are there any family names patterns we liked?
Was it too old fashioned?
Was there obvious school yard taunting capabilities?
Did it have negative connotations?
Are a lot of pets using the name?
Had to keep suggesting them until we landed on a shortlist of names she hasn’t yelled out in frustration. She was a teacher.
“What about ‘Kevin’”?
“ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?”
Alphabetically. Aardvark is doing great. His younger brother is really good at math.
My girlfriend and I agreed easily for a girl’s name, but couldn’t agree in a boy’s name.
Eventually (like months into the pregnancy), by talking, one name came out and we both loved it.
We knew the names we liked, and waited for the surprise. It was a boy :)
Catholic saints’ names.
Me and the wife each separately looked through lists of names on those sites, then we compared notes on ones we liked. This lead to our shortlist. Over the course of a few weeks we managed to narrow it down untill we had a name we both liked with the advantage of having said it out loud many times… so it was good.
Using the name before deciding on it is definitely a critical part of picking a good name.
In general I look for receipts or random pieces of paper I find on the side of the curb on a rainy day. But that’s just me.
My mom found my name in the ending credits of a random show.
My third son, for example, is named Hmmmblehgjlighininah Stornagherighison
A proud Finnish heritage lives on 🫡
That’s so poetic.
My son is Subtotal Tree Fiddy.
We each picked names until we found something we both liked a lot. We both tended towards classic names with standard spelling that weren’t currently popular. One has since become popular but what can you do.
Nothing that rhymes with a body part, one or two syllables, easy to spell and say, easy for other folks to understand and spell without additional guidance.
Sometimes I wonder if picking the name you feel is too popular, is best for not-too-popular (but recognisable) because everyone’s trying the same thing!
War of attrition.
We were careful to choose first names that are easy to spell on first hearing and can be understood in multiple cultures. Their second names are a little bit more exotic in case they don’t like the simpler ones.
Told the granddads to choose a name as is Korean tradition.
Get one of the books with baby name suggestions. Weed out all of the names of annoying uncles and aunts, childhood bullies etc. Let your partner do the same. Then get rid of all of the names that rhyme with something silly so they won’t be bullied in school for their name. Then argue about the few remaining names and pick one or a few. Sleep a few nights, then take a long, hot/steamy shower and commit to it.
I just run
cat /dev/urandom | strings | head -10Until I find something that slaps.
TIL you can generate random character strings like that
There’s room for improvement, as strings in this configuration will output arbitrary lengths, so it’s very likely to result in 10 lines with 1 char, or one line with a length of 100+
grep ‘[[:alpha:]]{3,16}’?
Are you checking out the competition Elon?
Last name is single syllable so the first had to be 2 or more. Made a big list of names I liked the sound of and people I admire and let my wife decide from that. Would have been happy with any of them. We didn’t know the sex yet so we picked both a male and female name.
The middle name is Tiberius after James Tiberius Kirk from Star Trek.
1st kid: a more or less random name that I liked.
2nd kid: My dads middle name
3rd kid: rand9m name my GF liked
4th: Ada, after Ada Lovelace
