Since we’re all about etymology, what about this site’s name? Where did the berry bit come from?
I too have been wondering this! Perhaps our admin can enlighten us.
Hello! Renrose, I want to briefly address the term “admin,” which sounds like a hired functionary. In fact, Nameberry was created and is still run solely by me and [name]Linda[/name] Rosenkrantz, now with our engineer partner [name]Hugh[/name] [name]Hunter[/name], based on ten bestselling books about names we’ve written over the past 25 years. We do everything from writing and editing the blogs to updating the database to deleting spam.
On the name Nameberry, we considered literally hundreds of other possibilities. [name]Early[/name] on our working name for the site was Coolnamer.com since one of our most popular books is Cool Names, but we ended up deciding against namer. Of course a big consideration was which domains were available. We arrived at a handful of finalists and polled friends and colleagues on their favorites. Some other contenders were nameniks.com, denamer.com, namecrazed.com and namesifter.com. Nameberry got the most positive votes and people saw it as a cross between the warm, friendly, earthy berry and the techy Blackberry, which felt right to us.
I believe we wrote an article about choosing the name Nameberry for a magazine but I can’t find it in my files or via google. Let me ask [name]Linda[/name] when she’s up whether she has it and I’ll try to either post it or link if it exists online.
Nope, we wrote about naming The [name]Baby[/name] Name Bible, not Nameberry!
[name]Hi[/name] [name]Pam[/name], I think you and [name]Linda[/name] chose well! I love the warmth in the term “Nameberry”.
Me too-- and the ‘blackberry’ connection never even occurred to me. Nameniks is catchy, too.
Finally I can explain it to my Daddy!
I have always wondered that as well! Especially when I suggest the site to friends and they give me the “wait that’s what your favorite website is called?” look. Good on you [name]Blade[/name], you always ask the tough questions. =]
Thanks, everybody. I have to say, when I saw some of the names originally on the list, I thought they were pretty good – not as good as Nameberry, but I liked more of them than I remembered. Though in the “good old days” of the internet, circa 2008, there were a lot more good names available.
And just fyi, here’s the old article we wrote on naming The [name]Baby[/name] Name Bible–
/404 Ican’t seem to get the link to go live.
And if you’re wondering why [name]Pam[/name] had to wait until I was up–we’re working on opposite coasts–she on the [name]East[/name], me on the [name]West[/name].
And here’s that old article we wrote on naming the name book:
So what were the divisive, partnership-shattering takes on [name]Henrietta[/name]? 
[name]Pam[/name] I can’t understand how I could ask myself the same question a ‘million’ times (ie how did [name]Pam[/name] and [name]Linda[/name] choose the name of our site?), and not consider the obvious which was to simply ask you. (Thank you blade!)
I think nameberry is a great name, it has a nice, warm and fuzzy feeling.
rollo
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