I was just reading a thread on a mom’s forum about whether a name’s popularity mattered to people when choosing a name, and no less than 3 separate people responded that yes it did, and that’s why they were glad they chose a name that was not too common. And the baby names, were, respectively:
[name]Charlotte[/name]
[name]Vivienne[/name]
[name]Lila[/name]
I hate to break it to them, but I think these mothers may be in for a rude awakening on their child’s first day of preschool!
Some of these people may not all be in the same country though. Some names that are popular in the US might not be so popular in other countries. Since moving to the US, I have met so many people named [name]Jennifer[/name] (I later learned it was the most popular name here in the 80s) but I had never met anyone named [name]Jennifer[/name] back home. Maybe those three names aren’t popular in other countries.
good point - but trust me, they were all from the US. I think most people don’t follow names obsessively as, say, myself, so they hear a name that sounds somewhat obscure in passing (on a TV show or in a gossip magazine), not realizing that people all over the country (who are reading the same magazines and watching the same TV shows) are attracted to the same “unique” name
Yep, this happened (and is still happening) with [name]Isabella[/name] and [name]Sophia[/name], as well as all the -ayden and -aylee names for boys and girls, respectively. People want an “unusual” name, but they want fresh as opposed to weird.
And a lot of names - even [name]Charlotte[/name], for instance, but especially [name]Vivienne[/name] - really aren’t heard a lot outside of forums like this one. [name]Just[/name] because a name crops up a lot in speculation doesn’t necessarily mean that parents are actually going to use it.
Yes but there are over 1 million or billion people in the us. And only a thousand something of babies where born with those names. so really compared to the country and the world’s population the names really aren’t as popular as they seem.
It’s the same way that people say they don’t care what people think about the way they dress but then they dress similarly to their friends. It all comes down to fitting in with the group specific to you. Also name trends tend to be local so in your area there may be all classic names and in another there may be all unisex names.
Poor mums, they should have come to nameberry!
LOL <3
I think that popularity is relative term. While I personally think a name is the top 300 is popular there are some people who think its just the top 20, 50 or 100 that are “popular.” So, with that they may not define [name]Charlotte[/name]- 68, [name]Lila[/name]-168, [name]Vivian[/name]-164 as popular. In reality only 1,913 girls, which is less than 1% of girls born in [name]America[/name] last year were named [name]Lila[/name], which really starts to sound less popular when you break the numbers down like that.
Yeah but what happens is that many people start avoiding the names that are in the top 10-20, and all of a sudden, the name that they were comfortable choosing instead because it was “only 64th in popularity” is all of a sudden in the top 20 5 years down the road, because many others used the exact same reasoning. As a result, I would be very surprised if all 3 of those names ([name]Charlotte[/name] in particular) did not continue to trend sharply upwards.
And using the “it’s only a small percentage of the overall population” reasoning, one should never be concerned about the popularity of even the most popular of names.
No kidding. I recently met a little girl named [name]Olivia[/name] [name]Sophia[/name] and her little sister [name]Sophie[/name]. Her mother told me that she picked [name]Olivia[/name] because she knew too many [name]Sophia[/name]'s but then she named her younger daughter [name]Sophie[/name] because she wasn’t hearing it anymore.
Too bad - I just love [name]Vivian[/name]/[name]Vivienne[/name].