Unusual Baby Girl Names

Unusual baby girl names are more common than unusual names for baby boys, according to researchers.

However, according to research done by Alexander Bentley and Matthew Hahn of Duke University, most new parents copy existing popular names when naming their babies.

This situation is slowly changing, according to the research, as the rate at which parents are inventing new names is increasing.

Novelty in names, as defined by new names entering the list of the top 1,000 American names, increased in the 1990s compared to earlier decades.

For example, during the 1990s, there were 184 new boys' names on the list, the largest number of any decade of the 20th century.

On average, however, parents traditionally have been more inventive when it comes to baby girl names.

The Duke University researchers found that for every 10,000 baby girls born in America there is an average of 2.3 new unusual baby girl names (vs. 1.6 for baby boys).

Choosing Unusual Baby Girl Names

One of the aims on choosing unusual baby girl names is to find ones that are not in the recent top 1,000 most popular baby girl names list published by Social Security Administration (at ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/).

For baby girl names, this means finding names that were used less than 230 times by parents in 2003.

The 1000th most popular baby girl name for 2003, used with 230 baby girls, was Katy.

Ways to find such names include using foreign versions of popular U.S. names, using place names as first names, and creating totally new baby girl names.

Some parents have found a nice way to a unique first-name / last-name combination by using first names from latin-based languages other than English (including French, Spanish, and Italian).

Place names are sometimes used to make unique combinations with last names.

Some place names, such as Brooklyn and Paris, have in fact become very popular.

Brooklyn was the 119th most popular (girl) name and Paris was the 275th most popular (girl) name in 2003, according to the SSA.

Increasingly popular way to come up with a unique name is to create a uniquely new one.

The main ways in which new abstract baby names are created include:

• scrambling letters in the original names
• scrambling vowels in the original names
• scrambling consonants in the original names
• combining names
• spelling the names differently
• adding prefixes to the original names
• adding suffixes to the original names

If you'd like to read more about creating baby names, see here.

When you create abstract, unique baby girl names, you lose much on the substance that goes with many first names, as there won't be any specific meaning associated with the name (other than it's unique).


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