The Baby Name Wizard

Alexis- the names in the baby nursery are actually only 5 for 12 babies- isn't Harry a nn for Henry? Good wishes to you and newbie Phoebe!

Girls:
DeClass`e
Magazine (nn Maggie)
Anxiety
Amphetamine (nn Minny or Amy)
Temerity
Amenhorrea (sorry about my spelling!)

Boys:
Bollard
Terror
Frame
Grim
Gingham
Pencil

AG my sisters name is actually Lucy Anne so the sibling names I suggest would be
Emily (Selina)
and Alice (Elizabeth)

However I totally would not call my child Emily at this point, so I don't blame anyone who rules it out.

Funnily enough May was a name considered for my Lucy's middle name, as its my nan's middle name.

Other names my parents considered were Rosie, Lizzie and Lottie. And my mum has always loved Florence.

Personally I think you need another y name to go with Lucy. How about Daisy? or Carrie? They both seemed to have been popular at around the same time as Lucy.

To comment on some of the names mentioned in the above comments...I grew up with an Acadia who went by the nn Cadi.
I went to college with both a Cinnamon and a Promise.
All of these girls would now be in their early 30s...

Alexis --

The Ethel-Mae Postulate strikes again! Congratulations on your new little one!

French names for Lucy Ann's sister:
Some ideas from top 50 list on tous-les-prenoms.com, these are some of what's popular in France at the mo, although not so much in the Anglophone world:

Amelie
Lea
Manon
Chloe
Camille
Oceane
Clara
Ines
Mathilde
Maeva (pron May-ay-vah)
Juliette
Morgane
Marion
Celia
Noemie
Amandine
Clemence
Elise
Laurine
Elodie
Lena
Maelys (that's Maya-lis)

Karyn,

Your focus on the word endings to determine masculinity or femininity seems to relate directly, whether consciously or unconsciously, to the influence of Latin and the other Romance languages, particularly Italian and Spanish (French to a somewhat lesser extent).

All of these languages have gendered nouns and it is the ending that most often shows the gender. Even though we don't have this in English, we are somewhat familiar with the concept.

I teach Italian, and to begin the lesson on the gender of nouns, I ask my students, "What is the difference between Maria and Mario." Obviously, the answer is that Maria is a girl and Mario is a boy. Ok, "What is the difference between bambino and bambina?" Most can figure out that bambino is a boy baby, and bambina is a girl baby. Ok, "What is the difference between libro and penna?" (book and pen, words they have already learned). A book is masculine and a pen is feminine. A weird concept, (especially for 15-year-olds who have never studied a foreign language before), but they are able to see that an -o ending means masculine and an -a ending means feminine.

In Latin, the -us ending is masculine, while -um is actually neuter (-a is still feminine). Your examples of Lemmine, Gavelline, and Spartane (I think Spartane is particularly lovely, btw :) ), are more French, which will often add an -e to make a word feminine.

So I agree with your m/f catogories completely!

Alexis -- Congratulations on baby Phoebe! Five Charlottes in one nursery ... wow. Bet you're glad you chose Phoebe.

Re: Juliana -- I like it. I, too, prefer the single /n/ spelling.

As a Phoebe, I'm definately a fan of the name :-) I love that it's making a comeback and doesnt sound quite so old fashioned anymore. And same goes for Claire. When just about every one of my classmates' middle names were Ann, Marie, Michelle/Danielle, and Lee, Claire was a plesant change. And i think its a sweet name that will fit sweet little girls everywhere.
But then...I'm biased :-)

Hi-
I just want to put in a shameless plug for my baby-naming forum: http://namethatbaby.mit.edu It's still growing, only about 40 members so far, and we'd love to have some more! :-)

Marjorie--

Cellar door is actually quite a common phrase that is held to be beautiful. According to Wikipedia, "The English compound cellar door plays a certain role in discussions of phonoaesthetics; a widely repeated claim first put forward by J. R. R. Tolkien in his essay English and Welsh (1955) holds that its sound is intrinsically beautiful."

It was also mentioned and played a fairly prominent role in the movie Donnie Darko.

I think your friend may have picked it up somewhere. :)

Karyn and Alitalia,
I agree with your assessments of the endings on names being classically -a(female) or -o(male). I was just comparing some of the word endings though in that there are many more female names that end in things like -ity, -ine, and -ia and more boys names that end in -ax/ex/ix. Even though to me Calyx sounds like a girls name Ajax sounds like a boys name. Verizon/Horizon sound like girls names and Dakota/Montana sound like boys names. There are exceptions to every rule but I wondered what everyone thought of some of the "word names" we've been listing.

Alexis-Congrats to Phoebe! I guess everyone should be putting Charlotte on their up+comer list for next year.

I think Cecelia is a great choice for Lucy Ann.
Also, something like Shyla, Shannon, Samantha, Cheryl also have that same beginning sound.

Alitalia - I actually had a whole paragraph about just that but I didn't want to overstate my point or go on too long.

I speak French and I know that my knowledge of words' gender influences how I feel about them, but when I tested out a bunch of them I found that I mostly had that reponse when the word was in French (eg. Chaise is definitely feminine but Chair feels male.) I actually deleted the example of Voyeur from my "male" list because I *knew* that its maleness was due to the masculine ending of "eur".

Thanks for clearly explaining what I was too lazy to articulate!

Also, (insomnia strikes again,) I was trying to find "root words" that, depending on the suffix, sound male or female:

Post = Male
Postman = Male, obviously (like Coleman or Truman)
Poster = Male
Posterior = Male
BUT
Posterity = Female

I had another but sleep seems to have scared it away. Anyone have any others?

Karyn, I can't think of any root words to illustrate my point, but I finally thought of something else for an illustration of the beginnning sounds.
Take the words Pringle, Jingle, Mingle, Single. Now my point was that there is a feminine slant on Single because many popular girls names these days start with S so to me that is female(F). Kind of like the "x" factor of the JP's. However, the "Pr" seems more Male. The J could be either based on names like Jennifer or James. M could also be either based on Michelle or Michael. If these were "real" names though I would say M;F;M;F. *Hope that made some sense.

A few more words-as-names-that-won't-do
Creeper
Shopper
Dresser
Garter
Random
Survey
Barren
Burden
Sullen (nn Sulky)

Zoerhenne - I understand what you mean now, and I agree that the beginning letter or syllable of a word can influence the gender of it as a name. But I think that it works with the ending of the word. So if the ending is clearly male/female then the beginning loses some clout. However, if it is a gender-ambiguous ending then the beginning gains influence. Maybe?

I have met child named Ransom, but I think it was a family name, so maybe that doesn't qualify.

The stuff about endings is true, but keep in mind there are strongly masculine names in Italian that end in -a such as Luca, Andrea and Nicola. Of course because of their ending, they get used as female names elsewhere. For example Jennie Garth's eldest is Luca Bella.

Karyn and Zoerhenne,

I wonder if the feminine -ity ending also comes from Latin / Romance languages... nouns that end in -ity in English often end in -itas in Latin and -ità in Italian, and are feminine in both languages. E.g. unity / unitas / unità. Felicity / felicitas / felicità.

So would it make sense to think that these positive qualities were given as names (Felicity - happiness, like Faith, Hope, and Charity - is Unity a name?), and nouns that were already feminine were more likely to be given to girls?

I also agree with Zoehrenne's first-letter theory, and Pringle, Jingle, Mingle, Single being M/F/M/F. This seems much more based on "feeling" rather than linguistics, to me at least. Any theories?

This is off-topic, but I was taking a look at the SSA's list of most popular names for twins in 2007. They don't break the names down by gender (boy/boy, one of each, or girl/girl), but I used what I learned from BNW to come up with an interesting thought.

Let's take a look at the first two pairs (starting from the most popular) which are gender-ambiguous: Madison/Morgan and Taylor/Tyler.

With Madison and Morgan, most likely Madison would be a girl just from the fact that Madison was #5 for girls last year and not in the top 1000 for boys. Now as to whether Morgan would be a boy or girl, based on the rankings Morgan is more likely to be a girl but could also plausibly be a boy. However, I think that Morgan is even more likely to be a girl in the Madison/Morgan twinsets because of the "correlation of styles"*: Based on what I've learned about name styles and sibling matches, someone who likes Madison for a girl is probably more likely to use Morgan for a girl than for a boy because Morgan as a girl's name more closely matches the style of Madison than Morgan as a boy's name.

With the Taylor/Tyler pair, either one could realistically be of either gender (based on the rankings Tyler is much more common for boys, more so than the gender gap with Taylor). However, unlike with the Madison/Morgan pair the likelihood of the different gender possibilities is probably more similar to what you would find among Taylors and Tylers from the general population of births from this time who aren't siblings*. This is because these names share a more similar style between the genders (unlike Morgan which likely fits into different "style families" for each gender). Based on my analysis and the general popularities of these two names, here's the likelihood of each combination from most to least likely: Taylor-girl/Tyler-boy, Taylor-boy/Tyler-boy, Taylor-girl/Tyler-girl, Taylor-boy/Tyler-girl.

*I've ignored the factor of same-gender twins tending to be a little more likely than twins of opposite gender (from what I've heard) in this analysis.

Tiffany -

True, but those masculine names that end in -a are very much an exception - and I think they all derive from Greek names (Andreas - meaning man interestingly enough, Lucas, Nicolas). There are also a handful of nouns in Latin and Italian that end in -a but are still masculine - my Latin teacher called them the PAIN nouns. Poeta (poet) Agricola (farmer) Incola (inhabitant) Nauta (sailor). In Italian poeta, artista and Papa (Pope) are also masculine but, like with the abovementioned names, these words are very much the exception, not the rule.

As for people using Luca and Nicola as feminine names, well, that's their prerogative, and we've discussed the crossover of names from masculine to feminine many times here!

Oh, I was just pointing it out :) Exceptions yes, but there are more than a few IMO!

I don't really think of names like "Luca" as crossover names. More likely people simply did not know the Italian name was male or pick it from another culture where it is female. I guess I'd consider it a crossover if Italian parents started using in for their Italian baby girls - which isn't likely to happen for a number of reasons.

Alitalia - yes, Unity has been used as a name: a fairly famous bearer of the name was Unity Mitford. Maybe that puts parents off!

Related to this discussion is an article in Slate today about name changes that were denied - fits our topic of words that could be names - but in the case of the guy that wanted to change his name to 1069 - aren't.
http://www.slate.com/id/2196204/

Piggybacking on Tiffany and Alitalia's comments, I'm wondering how many male names that end in -a are out there. I can only immediately think of Ira and Ezra. If I add an -h I can think of quite a few more, but those are the only pure -a male names that come to mind.

Well, Ezra and Ira are both Hebrew names which end with the "ah" sound but not the same letter as makes the feminine word-final "ah" noise. (Ezra and Ira end with an aleph while most common feminine Hebrew words ending in "ah" end with the letter hey.) So as far as I can tell, the fact that, in English, Ezra and Ira end with "a" and not "ah" is really a matter of transliteration, not gender.

To Phillippa, Tiffany, Alitalia et al:
In languages where there is no grammatical gender, the ending does not matter. E.g. in Finnish (where there is only one word that means both "he" and "she") endings are not indicative.
Names like Mika, Pekka and Juha are male name variants of Michael, Peter and John, and Aino, Pirjo and Marjo are female (Aino is native, others are forms of Birgitta and Maria). Female names do, however OFTEN end in -a, following conventions in neighbouring naming cultures and trends.
Not surprising that both Ira and Ezra are biblical/hebrew names. But... does anyone know how this specific Arabic naming tradition has come about (e.g. male: Samir, female Samira)? I would have thought the a-for-female was an Indo-European language thing.

I always loved the name Ferris. My dh's name is Peter and I think they're somehow derived from the same base.

I've been thinking a lot about the name Matthias lately. Any consensus on how it's pronounced in America?

Does anyone remember the old Saturday Night Live (I think) skit, "Quien es mas macho?" The host would hold up two random objects--a toaster and a lamp--and ask "quien es mas macho?" It was really funny, I guess because it played on how gender is constructed and on the randomness of gender assignations in Spanish.

Yes, that "cellar door" thing shows up all kinds of places; I was trying to remember the book I saw it in when Mara chimed in with the original source. Does anyone remember a book where someone decides that the most beautiful word in English is "refluffable?" Or was that me? Am I the only real-life person who confuses her experience with what she reads in books?

Annoyingly trendy ends to boys' names: -o, -x, and -er. I mentioned the "inappropriate -er names" game a while back (my favorite being "Whatever"), and we've covered a lot of X names (my favorite here being Lummox). What about -o?

Arlo, Rocco, and Milo, meet your brothers Pillo(w), Bronco, Gecko, and Dodo.

My, how I do go on.

In Hebrew, it is common to add an "ah" sound (via the letter hey) to the end of a noun or verb to make it female.

For example, my Hebrew name is Yaakova, the female version of Yaakov, Jacob (not a common name, but a name nonetheless,) and it is formed by adding a hey to the end of Yaakov.

It can sometimes seem a bit more complicated because in Hebrew, vowels are made with dots and lines added to the root letters, and these sometimes change when the feminizing hey is added to the end of the masculine root, but essentially the change was adding the letter to the end.

eg.
Boy = Yeled (root: Yud-lahmed-daled)
Girl = Yalda (Yud-lahmed-daled + hey, but different vowels under the consonants)

He said = Hoo amar (aleph-mem-raish)
She said = Hee amra (aleph-mem-raish + hey)

I'm laughing about the Finnish names because when my children were at an International school we'd start every year trying to work out which ones of the new children in their classes were girls or boys. I remember on the first day of kindergaten saying to my daughter: "Anyone called Totti must be a girl." and her look of absolute disgust when he turned out to be a big blond Finnish boy.

The letter K - Thanks for the info on Finnish names. I love learning more about languages I haven't studied yet!
Liz & Louka - I hadn't heard of Unity Mitford. Yikes! I definitely wouldn't name a kid after her!
Guest - I would pronounce Mathias ma-THIGH-us

wow, this is the most I've posted on this board! I guess I've got to keep myself busy as I sit here 4 days past my due date waiting...

"But... does anyone know how this specific Arabic naming tradition has come about (e.g. male: Samir, female Samira)? I would have thought the a-for-female was an Indo-European language thing."

First of all, a- for feminine is Italic, not Indo-European per se, and does not, as has been pointed out, hold true for all Italic nouns (agricola being the very first noun I leaned to decline and it is masculine). I will not go into the vowels of, say, Gothic, but there are masculine nouns in the nominative ending in -a and feminine in -o. For example, guma means man and is masculine. (Guma is cognate with Latin homo and is analogous to guma in English (guma is the source of 'groom' in 'bridegroom'). Germanic masculine monothematic names (generally taken to have been derived from nicknames of bithematic names) can end in -a (see kings Anna, AElla, Penda and Offa). In the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has some fun with names in -a and -o. Our favorite hobbit is really named Froda.

I don't know Arabic, but I do know something of its cousin Semitic language, Hebrew. In Hebrew a little boy is a yeled, and a little girl is a yaldah. King is melech and queen is malkah. As was pointed out, many feminine nouns and female names end in the letter het and male in the letter aleph, both of which get transliterated in English as -a/-ah. So we have Aviv as a male name and Aviva as female, Alon and Alona, Elior and Eliora and so on. If this is true in Hebrew, it is not unlikely to be equally true in Arabic.

Semitic and Indo-European were in contact in the biblical period. The Indo-European-speaking Hittites with their empire in Asia Minor are mentioned several times in te Bible. Abraham buys the cave of Machpelah as a burial place for Sarah from Hittites and Bathsheba's unfortunate husband is Uriah the Hittite. (Uriah is a Hebrew name--no clue what the poor guy's name was in Hittite.) Hence it is within the realm of possibility that there was some influence going back and forth.

BTW another masculine biblical name ending in -a which is used in English is Asa (spelled aleph samoch aleph).

Further btw and back to the topic of this particular entry, some "celebrity" I never heard of named Ingo Rademacher just became the father of a baby boy named Peanut Kai Rademacher. The Kai is in this instance Hawaiian because the mom is part Hawaiian. The Peanut is because the parents-to-be got to calling the fetus "Peanut" and then decided to make it official.

Hi Mara,

Thank you so much for sharing all the background for 'cellar door'.
I was not an English Lit major but a dear friend was, in the mid 50s. It was likely that she told me the correct details all those years ago and they have lingered in memory, the real story fading in my aging brain! Now I can repeat it accurately - thanks again.

Karen, Alitalia, and Kelly-exactly!!

Miriam-I knew you'd be helpful to this discussion. Thanks for helping me learn something new.

Beth-was the toaster "mas macho"? That's the one i would pick LOL.

Guest-I concur. Matthias=Ma-THIGH-us or something of that nature.

Another male Hebrew name ending in "a" is, of course, the super-popular Joshua.

I known a German Matthias, pronounced Mat-TEE-as

Another good example, Jane. And this name ends with a different Hebrew letter (ahyin) than Ezra (aleph), but still not the typically feminine word-ending letter hey.

OMG- Peanut? I'm having an anaphylactic reaction just thinking about such stupidity.

Re Hebrew boy's names: Have been reading this with great interest. How about my son's Hebrew name Yehudah (Judah). Ends in a hey. The female equivalant is Yehudit or Judith.

Also I can think of Aryeh which ends in a hey, and Yedidya (Jedediah) and Yonah (Jonah) and Saadya,and Menashe (Menasseh)

Keren, those are all interesting examples, all for different reasons. (You probably know everything I'm going to say, but others don't.)

1. Arieh and Menashe do end in a hey, but the vowel preceding it (the eh noise instead of the ah noise) doesn't conform to the general rule of feminine nouns ending in kamatz (an "ah" vowel) + hey. (Arieh means lion and is a masculine noun in Hebrew. Menashe was one of Joseph's two sons.)

2. Yedidya (meaning "Beloved by God") is one of those names in which the "ya" noise at the end isn't an indication of femininity, but rather means God because it is using the yud+hey form of God's name.

• Yedid = someone close to you
• Ya = God

Saadya is the same deal.
Saad means aid/help, so Saad+ya = Help of God.

3. Jonah is particularly interesting because, while it is a male name, the kamatz+hey "ah" noise at the end does indicate femininity because when used as the noun meaning "Dove" (ie. not a name), the word yonah is feminine. Curious that a feminine word is used as a male name. (Of course that particular bible story has a lot of symbolism and whatnot, so the name is used for a reason.)

Wow, I haven't gotten to use my Hebrew in a while... That was fun!

I didn't know any of that Karyn (We learned to read Hebrew and that was that) Fascinating. How about Yehudah?

In the Jewish name book I have (The New Name Dictionary by Alfred Kolatch) it says that many biblical names ending in - a or -ah are Aramaic rather than Hebrew.

words:
Marrow
Vespa
Frisbee

'A' ending males:
Jeptha (Jephthah)
Siddhartha
Krishna
Jorma

I know a Matthias who pronounces it ma-TEE-us. I have never heard the name with the "th" pronounced as "thigh" as other posters suggested. I have also seen it spelled Mattias, but maybe they are actually 2 different names? I always thought they were pronounced the same.

re: cellar door--for a word name with a similar sound, how about Celadon?

guest: I say ma-TAI-us.

Congrats Alexis on the birth of Phoebe! 5 Charlottes?! Wow!

Last night DH and I were looking at some genealogy DH just acquired from a long lost cousin. There are a *lot* of ancestors named Harry. His father has a brother, a cousin and an uncle Harry and that is just the next generation and his specific line. I started wondering if we should be naming this kid Harry. But given Alexis's post, maybe not!

The craziest thing though were the sib-sets:
Lets see if I can remember. This set were all born in the first part of the 20th century:

Charles Jesse
Raymond Earl (lots of Earl middle names too)
Edna Mae (!)
Rose Marie
Adelbrecht (who DH thinks had the middle name Adolf but was generally known as Delbert)

I think I'm missing one. Still, this is a crazy list to me--English name, English name, English name, German to the core name.

I've only known European Matthiases, and they said Ma-TEE-us. So, because of my exposure, Ma-TEE-us is my first pronunciation thought when I see it, but I would assume most Americans would say Ma-THIGH-us.

On the boys' names ending in -a(h) theme, of course there's Noah, and one of my favorites, Isaiah.

Another name that ends in -a that has been used for boys (but currently more common for girls) is Dana.

I have some backround in Arabic as a language, so maybe I can shed some light on the Samir/Samira questions.

Arabic, like many languages does make gender distintions of all nouns. So while a door (baab) is masculin, a table (tawilat) is feminine. Arabic, unlike French, makes it VERY obvious whether a noun is masculin or feminine because, with very few exceptions, female singular nouns end in -at (fatha-ta tawilat); Ta tawilat being a silent t, leaving the ending sounding like a short a (fatha). Adjectives describing nouns, in Arabic, agree in gender and therefore are also gender differenciated. Therefore, for example the arabic word for beautiful, jameel (jeem-meem-yay-lam), is used on men and becomes jameelat (jeem-mee-yay-lam-ta tawila) for feminine. Most Arabic names, I've noticed, are adjectives and so follow this rule (ie. Aliya(t)=high, Aziz=dear, Habib=love etc). Exceptions I can think of off the top of my head are Leila, which is a feminine noun meaning night, and Anissa, the female noun meaning, well, female. This is simply Arabic grammar translated into a form of naming; It's all very traditional.

Eastern Betty, I think, may be able to add to my novice Arabic knowledge.

Another boy's name ending in "a" which has been in the headlines lately is Shia, which I think I read somewhere that he said it means, "King" but when I just googled a random baby name site says it means "Followers, Sect" and is of Arabic origin, like perhaps the religion???

Thanks everyone for the name suggestions for Lucy Ann3's sister. There were def. some good ones in there! I adore Daisy but is that a name that grows up well?

I'm making a list of suggestions for her and here's what I've got:
Jillian
Phoebe
Charlotte (love Lottie as a NN) Although it's VERY popular in Melbourne, thankfully she's in the Southern US. Congratulations, Alexis on your little Pheobe!!!
Daisy
Celia

Any other suggestions in that vein? What she really likes is a name with simple spelling, but classic, timeless style. A name with one standard pronunciation. For Americans in the South her last name is a doozy so the first name has to stay simple yet not boring! :)