For me my name obsession started when I was 8. My Mum was expecting my youngest sibling (I’m the eldest of 5 children) and her and my Dad were discussing names. They joked about calling the baby [name]Vera[/name], to which being an untactful 8 year old I said “that’s a disgusting name” not realising it was my Dad’s mother’s name. They then asked me for suggestions, I remember feeling really excited about the prospect of having input into my baby brother or sister’s name. I would write lists in the back of my school books of names that I loved and names that I didn’t like. I started naming my dolls things like [name]Juliet[/name] or [name]Anastasia[/name] while all my friends were using names like [name]Brittany[/name] or [name]Chloe[/name]. From there I became obsessed with the meaning behind names and family traditions when it comes to naming.
Although not everyone likes it, honouring someone special and family tradition is important to me when it comes to naming. [name]Elizabeth[/name] was named after my Grandma [name]Betty[/name] (Her full name was [name]Elizabeth[/name]) and [name]Annabelle[/name]'s middle name [name]Cadence[/name] is to honour my husband being a musician.
I can’t remember ever not being obsessed with names. I’ve been a writer my whole life so naming characters is sort of second nature. I think my most vivid memory of thinking about names involves naming my rabbit when I was thirteen. I had a little pink names book that I used to read all the time (I may still have it somewhere) and I went through every page making detailed lists until I finally settled on [name]Odette[/name] Though we ended up calling her Detty 90% of the time
It started when I was eight or nine and I was playing with imaginary friends and I just couldn’t fathom what to name them – so I did some research and then at age twelve or so when I started writing stories, I became even more interested in names for my characters and I had this philosophy between the link of name and personality, and from those days forth I always kept a list of my favourites. I was delighted to discover Nameberry! I can’t think why I hadn’t found it before.
My favourite toy rabbit family wore 1800’s kind of clothes, my 8 year old self thought hard about appropriate names for them, such as [name]Clara[/name], [name]Rosie[/name], [name]Benjamin[/name], [name]Edward[/name], [name]Lulu/name etc and from that my vintage/classic naming obsession began!
I don’t really have an “obsession” but I definitely got interested in middle school when I started writing. I began looking up names for my characters and forming lists. I usually went for meanings, but now I focus mostly on sound (occasionally meaning) since my focus is on the name fitting the character, sometimes the meaning works, but the name doesn’t work. Despite this, I only have a select few names that stand out to me that I would use on a future child. I like a lot of names, but only love a few.
From one of those 89-cent mini-magazines they used to have in grocery-store check-out lines. My mom bought it for me so I could look up my name and friend’s names. I think I had the thing memorized before long
I helped my pregnant neighbor name her daughter when I was 8.
She was [name]Jennifer[/name] & she liked that her name was long, not made up/older, had lots of nicknames. I suggested [name]Rebecca[/name] & she used it!
Probably somewhere around middle school. I think I was crushing on some boy and did the whole fantasizing about what we would name our kids when we got married. Ha! I doubt I was ever a blip on his radar!
The name obsession didn’t really kick in until I was in high school, and started looking up baby names on the internet.
Very very young, I remember playing dolls with my friend, and half the game would be making up my dolls names first, and then usually changing them halfway through the game when I tired of the first name!!!
Probably when I was around 10. I had a lot of pets and my family used to breed various species of parrots. Each one I named. They got names ranging from Ruffous, to [name]Lucy[/name], to [name]Jeremiah[/name], to [name]Iago[/name], to [name]Robin[/name], to [name]Jezabel[/name], to [name]Ethel[/name], to Teako, to [name]Yoshiko[/name], etc. I loved looking up the meanings of names and collecting them in notebooks, it was fun for me to name all of these little critters. My fascination with names has never stopped.
i always was interested in names and liked the more unusual ones, but i really didn;t start obbsessing until confirmation. i loved the idea of picking a name for myself, maybe i’ll use it in the future or in my full name? i found nameberry that way and became even more obbsessed!!! i didn’t realize until later that the saint name had to have meaning, so i chose [name]Cecelia[/name], saint of music… it’s starting to grow on me, but sometimes i wish [name]Valentine[/name], [name]Apollo[/name], [name]Cloud[/name], or [name]Elodie[/name] had more meaning.
My interest (obsession) probably started the day I got my first barbie dolls…maybe when I was about 5. I never really liked the names some of them came with so I started making up my own name combos for them, although at that time I used a lot of common names.(I started thinking a little more outside the box with names when I was much older) [name]Every[/name] year I would change their names. While I liked names back then it started kicking in more when I was in about 5th grade and since them I’ve been obsessed with names. Since I was about 13 years old I pulled away from the barbies and started thinking about names for my future children. I’m sure if I found the papers I wrote down my favorite names for my children and compared it to my list now it would be totally different.
Loving other peoples’ stories I was a little older I think, probably early teens. My friends and I would discuss potential future child names at sleepovers and make up pretend families etc (helped greatly by The Sims!) I can remember looking through my grandma’s baby name book and seeing the lists she had for my aunts which I think inspired me. I reckon my style was then refined through school experiences as a lot of the bullies and bad kids tended to have similar names- [name]Chelsea[/name], [name]Tyler[/name], [name]Skye[/name], [name]Danielle[/name], [name]Portia[/name]- which put me off anything like that!
I was in the 6th grade when I started becoming obsessed with names. I would make up stories in my head and think of names for the characters. [name]Ever[/name] since then my obsession has grown massively and I looove finding new names to this day.
I’ve been vaguely interested in names since my younger sister was born. I was eleven, and my parents asked me and my brothers to help, so they gave us a copy of “Beyond [name]Jennifer[/name] and [name]Jason[/name]” to look through. I was a little annoyed because my middle name’s [name]Jason[/name]
My interest/borderline obsession with names, though, has only been within the past year as we’ve been making plans for our third child through an incredible adoption agency. Basically, I realized just how common my kids’ names are, and wanted to put a little more effort into the name this time around. Now that I’ve been on Nameberry…oops, I’m obsessed.
My naming obbession started in a kind of odd way I’ve always been interested in names and named dolls, toys and other inanimate objects for as long as I can remember however actually going on name sites actually was a bit of a fluke. I was on my computer and the internet was barley working and absouetly no game sites were loading (I was about 11 or 12) and I just started googling random things and one of the only websites that would load was a website a name meanings. I was on it all afternoon and have been obsessed ever since.
Though we ended up calling her Detty 90% of the time 
