Category Archives: Name Resources

New Name Data Available: Complete Name Data From South Australia, 1944-2013

07 Wednesday Jan 2015

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Exciting news for all name nerds, especially those from South Australia! The Attorney-General’s Department for South Australia has made available all names given between the years 1944 and 2013. Yep that’s right – no messing around with five or more births, this is every single name given to every single baby for almost seventy years.

For example, last year some of the unique names given to boys in South Australia were Igor, Leek, Nazareth, and Woodrow, while girls with one-off names were Chloris, Era, March, and Swanika.

If you’ve ever downloaded the complete name data from the US Social Security website, it’s very similar to that. You download the main folder as a rar file, then access a separate Excel file for each year, which has all names listed from most uses to least. The main difference is that there is a separate file for boys’ and girls’ names.

To find this gold mine of name data, go to

http://www.data.sa.gov.au/dataset/popular-baby-names

and download the yellow csv file, labelled Most Popular Baby Names (1944-2013), which is the first link.

Happy name searching! And in case you’re wondering, of course this information is going to be used on the blog in various ways. A permanent link will be made available on the Links to Name Data page as well.

My Favourite Boys Names from “The Nameberry Guide to the Best Names for Boys”

14 Saturday Dec 2013

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After I posted a list of some of my favourite girls names from Linda Rosenkrantz and Pamela Redmond Satran’s Nameberry Guide to the Best Names for Girls, a blog reader made the reasonable request that I do the same for the boys names – which I didn’t do the first time.

So here are thirty of my favourite boys names from The Nameberry Guide to the Best Names for Boys. Once again, I have avoided the names already chosen by Brooke at Baby Name Pondering – which caused quite a bit of anguish at times!

Thank you to Mia for suggesting this post.

The Nameberry Guide to the Best Baby Names for Girls

09 Monday Dec 2013

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Linda Rosenkrantz and Pamela Redmond Satran have brought out a companion piece to their e-book The Nameberry Guide to the Best Baby Names for Boys, this time focusing on the best names for girls.

The Nameberry Guide to the Best Baby Names for Girls is just as good as the boys’ name edition, and in fact you get 650 girls names – fifty more than the boys. To me it seems as if the girls names are slightly more daring than the boys overall, and also more in tune with what’s on trend here. Because of this, I would probably recommend the girl’s name guide even more highly.

The biggest brow-raiser for an Australian reader is the occasional suggestion of names for girls that have only charted for boys here, such as Campbell, Riley and Elliot – although this may well appeal to certain parents as something a bit out of the ordinary.

To give you a taste of what’s inside, I will share some of my favourite names from the guide that have never been common in Australia. (Brooke at Baby Name Pondering also shared some of her favourites, so I will make a conscious effort not to duplicate what she says, even though I love nearly all her suggestions).

  • Amabel
  • Anais
  • Arden
  • Blythe
  • Carys
  • Clea
  • Damaris
  • Elodie
  • Fiorella
  • Guinevere
  • Hermione
  • Isadora
  • Jessamine
  • Juno
  • Kerensa
  • Lilou
  • Melisande
  • Orla
  • Paloma
  • Posy
  • Romy
  • Saskia
  • Seren
  • Tallulah
  • Thisbe
  • Vesper
  • Viveca
  • Winnie
  • Zelda
  • Zenobia

You can buy The Nameberry Guide to the Best Baby Names for Girls from the Nameberry store, or from Amazon.

The Nameberry Guide to the Best Baby Names for Boys

07 Monday Oct 2013

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Look on parenting sites and name forums, and one of the most common complaints is, We can’t come up with any good names for boys. People even Google, Help – I have no boys names!, to reach this blog.

Enter this handy little e-book. There are nearly 20 000 boys names on the Nameberry database, and Linda Rosenkrantz and Pamela Redmond Satran have selected 600 that they consider the most appealing and usable – the best of boys names.

There are classic names like Henry and Thomas, modern classics like Liam and Benjamin, fashionable names like Cade and Jagger, hip names like Rufus and Barnaby, traditional names like Edmund and Solomon, and less common names, like Abraxas and Poe – not to mention plenty of names from non-Anglophone countries, like Stellan and Alonzo, and vocabulary names like Justice and Wolf.

That’s a pretty wide of selection of names – this isn’t one of those books which says there’s only one kind of name that’s good to choose for your son. I would say the majority of names are ones which are not popular, but not unusual either; but if you want popular or unusual, there’s plenty to choose from.

Entries give the meaning of the name, and note famous people with the name, as well as fictional namesakes. They also describes the style of the name, and how it fits in with current trends.

The book does mention how popular each name is internationally, but the trends are from a US perspective, and sometimes they don’t gel with what is fashionable or interesting here. However, most of the information would be helpful to Australian parents.

Each name is hyperlinked to the Nameberry database, and by clicking on the heading for that name, you will be taken to the Nameberry website, to receive more information about the name, and see if the name has been covered in blog entries or forum posts.

This e-book is available from the Nameberry store in several different formats, and if you would like a print version, it can be obtained from Amazon.

Matilda Magazine: Naming the Next Generation

25 Thursday Oct 2012

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Kate from Name Soiree and Sarah from For Real Baby Names have teamed up together to produce an online magazine for baby names, called Matilda. What a brilliant idea, and what a great name for it!

The first issue has just been released, and it looks fantastic. As well as articles about baby names, there’s also name consultations, name stories, personal stories and recipes. Abby from Appellation Mountain and Lou from Mer de Noms have contributed to the first issue, and I got to review some baby name blogs (read it to find out which ones).

The magazine’s website also has a blog, databases of girl and boy names, a name of the day, and polls. You should definitely go check it out, and if you like what you see, subscribe to the magazine to get updates, and also connect on Facebook.

Bold Baby Names

15 Tuesday May 2012

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We all love visiting Sarah’s blog, For Real Baby Names. In fact, I’ve even admitted being a little envious of her site, which is filled with the juiciest bits from birth announcements around the globe. (Mind you, now I collect my own BAs, on a much more modest scale, my envy has worn off quite a bit as I’ve realised the enormous amount of work involved).

Now Sarah has brought out her own e-book: Bold Baby Names: A Collection of Unusual Names. These are all baby names which don’t make the US Top 1000, and which have been found in recent birth notices.

So often you see names recommended on baby name sites, and you begin to doubt whether anyone even uses them. Would anyone really call their baby Aladdin or Frodo? Or Omega or Vixen? Well now you know that someone definitely did. On the other hand, there are plenty of “normal” names as well, like Cecil and Myrtle, but they’re so unusual today as to seem quite bold too.

Bold Baby Names is arranged alphabetically, and sorted into whether the name was given to a boy or a girl (although many of these names seem suitable for either gender). There are bold middle names to consider, intriguing celebrity baby names, and lists from different countries around the world.

Australia gets its own section, and I think Australian readers will find that a few of the names in this part will seem quite familiar. You may well find yourself saying, “But Lachie‘s my nephew’s name!”, or “I went to school with a girl called Jacinta!”. It just goes to show that we must all share our names with each other, because a fairly standard old name in one country may seem shockingly exotic in another.

For that matter, Sarah also includes the US Top 1000, and there’s some pretty unusual names even on this list. Precious, Clarence, Kimber, Cortez, Meadow and Legend seem reasonably far-out to me, yet there’s enough of them in the United States to make the country’s top name list.

If you are a big fan of For Real Baby Names, you will find yourself entranced by Bold Baby Names. It couldn’t be easier to get your hands on a copy – if you have PayPal, just click the BUY NOW button on Sarah’s site, and you will be able to instantly download it in handy PDF format.

It’s currently on special for US$2.99, so for the price of some small change, you can find out how to be a bold baby namer!

Baby Name Explorer: 110 Years of Name Data from New South Wales

03 Monday Oct 2011

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The Baby Name Explorer provides a way to browse through 110 years of the Top 1200 names in the state of New South Wales.

There’s two ways you can use it. The first way is just to scroll through the coloured graph on the website; the pink lines are girl names, the blue ones are boy names and the grey ones are unisex names. Aaron is at the top, and Zoe at the bottom. You can either find a name somewhere between Aaron and Zoe, and follow its fortunes through the years by moving across from left to right, or you can pick a period and move downwards to see what names were popular at a certain period.

For example, in the 1900s, William was the #1 name for boys, with 761 born each year, and Mary was the #1 name for girls, with 1150 born each year. (Leslie was the #1 unisex name). Some names from the 1900s are back in the charts, such as Ruby and Alexander, while Bessie and Clarence aren’t heard of so much these days.

The second way you can use it is to search for a particular name by typing it into the search bar. Once you do that, the name you ask for will come up alone on the chart in bright red and you see its popularity at various times.

For example, when I type in my own name, I can see that it wasn’t even in the Top 100 at the beginning of Federation, and didn’t become Top 100 until the 1950s. It was #55 in the 1970s, peaked in the 1980s, when it got to #39, and since then has declined until it is #71 today. Even though I wasn’t born in New South Wales, it’s still interesting information.

It’s obviously a great historical name resource, so thank you very much to the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, and to the Powerhouse Museum for supplying us with this database.