OK. It’s been awhile since we wrote our first naming the baby post.
Since they, JY and I have done quite some research, trying to find the best way to name our baby. I told JY that I remember reading from somewhere that the name one gives to the baby has a long-lasting impact on the baby’s life.
I finally found out where that information was from, it’s from the excellent book Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. I will review the book very soon, so look for the review.
In the last section of the book named: Perfect Parenting, Part II; or: Would a Roshanda by Any Other Name Smell as Sweet? the author addressed the topics of how a person’s name affect how people perceive him/her. It was loosely based on profession Roland G. Fryer Jr.’s work on black and white difference on achievement. The research was based on the study of 40+ years of child birth certificate data from California. In it, the author used statistical method to find out all the best and worst (whether popular or not) names for boys and girls.
To shorten it, basically, we came up with a new set of names for you to judge. The difference between this time and last time, was JY and I spent quite some time pouring over the data in the Freakonomics book, and identified a set of desirable names based on the weighing of the attributes. We’re also now including the middle name as well. The second column uses the middle initial, and the third column listed the name without the middle-name.
Please leave your comments in the Comments section.
Lucienne Rachel Wang Lucienne R Wang Lucienne Wang
Sophie Clementine Wang Sophie C Wang Sophie Wang
Ella Lucienne Wang Ella L Wang Ella Wang
Lauren Alexandra Wang Lauren A Wang Lauren Wang
Lauren Atara Wang Lauren A Wang Lauren Wang
Hannah Clementine Wang Hannah C Wang Hannah Wang
Rachel Alexandra Wang Rachel A Wang Rachel Wang
Edit:
Since this post is garnering a lot of attention, here is our baby name research methodology.
- The initial set of names are from “most popular names in 2015” section of the book mainly.
- We then looked at the origin of the name, the meaning as well as the “Mother Year of Education” from the book. Here is the resulting matrix:
Name
Origin
Meaning
Mother Year of Education
Alexandra
Greek
protector of mankind
14.67
Atara
Hebrew
A crown
16.00
Ava
German
A bird
14.97
Aviva
Hebrew
Springtime
16.18
Clementine
Latin
Merciful
16.23
Ella
Old English, old German
Beautiful fairy
woman, all
15.30
Emma
Old German
Universal, all embracing
15.23
Hannah
Hebrew
grace of God
14.44
Lauren
Latin
laurel leaves, honour, fame, spirit
14.58
Lucienne
Latin
Light
16.60
Maeve
Greek, Latin
Goddess, a purple flower
N/A
Rachel
Hebrew
little lamb, an ewe, one with purity
14.51
Sophie
Greek
Wisdom
15.45
- We then put the first name, middle name, and the last name together, and judged them on the sound of the name, the initials, and the anagrams. We also want the origin and the meanings of the first and middle names to be in harmony
- Finally, we went through a google search on the final candidates (first and middle names) making sure there is no one with that name that is of notoriety.
What do you guys think?
大家可以帮我们孩子选个好名字吗？