It doesn’t matter if you’re just planning on starting a family, or are already pregnant: one hardest tasks is coming up with a suitable name for your baby. There are also many aspects that can make the naming process even more difficult:
- Other family members may have ’staked their claim’ to baby names for their own families. It may sound quite territorial to “reserve” names, but it happens more often than one may think!
- There may be a cultural or traditional expectation to use the names of ancestors. This can sometimes be avoided for first names, though, as it’s now common practice to use ancestors’ names as middle names.
- But most significantly, it’s very difficult to strike a balance: one one hand, you want to have a unique name (i.e. something that’s not on the “top 100″), but one the other, you don’t want one that is inherently strange or inappropriate.
For this last situation, you do not need to resort (as one family did) to calling your child “Number 16 Bus Shelter”; in fact, there is an exceptionally easy solution to the problem of finding unique yet nice-sounding baby names: adopt a surname (i.e. last name) as a first name.
If you do this, you will quickly notice that although some last names just wouldn’t make sense, there are a variety of last names that make perfectly good, appropriate and best of all unique choices for your child. Let’s take a look at one of my favorite examples, the (male) name Harrington.
We know from doing baby name research that Harrington is of Irish / Old English origin, and believed to be a place name, possibly based on “herring town” or “Harry’s town.” Although it’s a relatively common last name, it is a very rare (but very nice sounding!) male first name. And, although it’s not very common, there are a few famous people who bear this name. Perhaps the most notable use of Harrington as a first name was as a pseudonym: Harrington Hext was the pseudonym for the renowned English author Eden Phillpots. Other famous Harringtons include: Harrington Clare Lees, Australian archbishop; Harrington Darnell Autry, American-football player and Harrington Evans Broad, an English politician.
Of course, this same strategy can be applied to a range of other surnames, as well — and is in fact often seen at work if one analyzes naming trends. (Consider, for example, the surge in the use of Anderson as a first name.) Thus, you can easily take a surname-based approach and find a good baby name for your little bundle of joy, while staying ahead of naming trends.
Barb Smith is a baby naming expert, and webmaster of the popular baby name origin website http://www.findbabynames.info Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/babies-articles/a-simple-technique-to-find-unique-appropriate-baby-names-1084055.html