Man I think it is getting harder and harder to find an original name that can still be found on a souvenir. We need to bring the Casey's back ;)

www.wafflingdesign.blogspot.com

Before anyone starts, let me pre-empt this by saying the Le-A story is a big fat fake. I actually traced its origin from a single Yahoo Answers post in 2008. Using Google cache I was able to actually see the way it spread and changed and mutated. I'm working on a paper for it for publication.

Sad that Atticus is becoming trendy! I've wanted to name my (who knows when in the) future son that since I was in high school!!

What in the world does this have to do with design? Stick to the topic, AT!

Atticus was one of my top picks 8 and 5 years ago; doesn't work in French though, which was a requirement for my husband. I'm really surprised at how popular it has become. Also loved the name Inigo (for Inigo Jones), and would love to see that a little more. (We ultimately went with a Danish name for our son which sounds good in French)

There are no Davids, Marks, Raymonds, Ronalds, James and Richards anymore. Can't think when I last met an Andrew... So I predict that in 10 years. we might start seeing some of these names resurface.

Every time these lists come out, I hope that my kids' names don't become trendy, but so far, so good. My daughter's name is more popular than my son's (there's a Novogratz who also sports it), but it is still pretty uncommon.

I'm sure everyone will have comments on specific names, but I have such a hard time with Scarlett. While there are plenty on the list that are fine, pretty or annoying, this one just gets a visceral reaction from me. It seems both overly adult for a child and extremely juvenile for an adult. I just have such strong associations with someone being so petulant and over dramatic.

When these kids grow up, all their daughters will be named Barbara, Patricia, Susan, Pamela and Deborah.

So, Tamarind. Where to begin.

Ok, so it's agreed that La-a is a big lie.

Outside of that, I call BS.

Do you really believe that with all the server wipes, website upgrades, data transfers, re-routes, re-writes, crashes, hacks, changes and other data based internet events that you have the single definitive source of a viral internet meme?

Snopes, for one, says it started in an email. Here's a tip - before you start writing that paper, you might want to actually take a peek at the largest hoax busting site on the web.

Oh, and the first email I ever read about related to this was deeply, overtly racist. So, you know, don't leave that part out.

This just seems like an attention grab to me, and a bad one at that.

Good luck writing that paper. <eyeroll>

I remember being the only "Alexandra" I knew up until... pretty much college. I couldn't find my name on a novelty license plate anywhere. Now it's pretty common, but I still get called "Alexandria" more often than not.

@HOLLYP - exactly! How is this discussion any different from the porn posting from last week? Because people spell out baby names in the nursery? That's a stretch. It's off topic. Post this in Odeedoh.

AT - are you having a mid-life crisis? Your audience doesn't want to get all its random news from you - I, for one, am very happy to read about all things home related on this site.

To the regular posters - sorry about my OT post. I'll leave it be - that kind of thing just gets under my skin.

I can't stand names that end in lyn or are a relatively normal name with a ridiculous spelling. But Londyn!? That's awful! If you want to name your kid something different, what's wrong with a traditional foreign name? Something Welsh or Scottish or Indian? Brynlee sounds like a stripper. Mason is a last name.

Also, my little brother was the only John in his entire school. There were five Forests in his class alone. I bet those moms thought Forest was quite an original name when they were filling out those birth certificates....

La-a is not a lie. I have a neighbor who teaches first grade and that was her student's name.

Nother random topic for a design site.
My hubby and I watched a documentary on names. People who try to be "unique" with names generally are not. In fact, it mentioned just how many girls are names "Unique" but spell it Youneeq,Uneek, Uni-k, etc. I use names for stories I write, and if I ever had a child, I read up on the popular names for kids and avoid them like the plague.

I second those who are pointing out this has absolutely nothing to do with 'Apartment Therapy'. Yup, just like the nonsense porn "article".
This site is so good. Please don't taint it.

@KEL N.
yeah, two years ago I also told my friends that I have a coworker name La-a. They believed me and I'm sure they've also at one point have said "La-a is not a lie. I have a friend who has a coworker with that name." It's called urban legends.

I noticed a lot of these names mirror the names of the babies from MTV's Teen Mom (my guilty pleasure- sorry!) Perhaps Teen Mom isn't proving to be as good as a birth control method as it is for me.. :)

It's a lie, Kel. It really is.

People tell stories like this in third person because it seems funnier or more interesting. Like the one about the glitter spray and the gynecologist. The Neiman Marcus cookie recipe... Free disney trip for forwarding emails... La-a is one of those. Your neighbor may be a fibber, but she was just trying to make light conversation by passing on a funny story.

@Tamarind - that paper sounds awesome!

It's funny, I was just reading about the top most hated names of the year and it is the same as most of the most popular! For every person crazy about naming their kids Jayden or Aiden or whatever, there's just as many who hate it.

http://shine.yahoo.com/parenting/most-hated-baby-names-is-your-kids-on-the-list-2480235.html

I couldn't do naming our son a trendy name. We went with traditional. My thinking as a kid and now, if I can't find the name in one of those spinny things of souvenir license plates or pencils or whatever, I won't name my kid that. Works for me just as I'm sure the uber-trendy names works for others.

I am deciding between, Emma, Anna and Sienna. My favorite is Sienna and my husband's favorite is Emma and we both like Anna. So what am I to do???

I wanted to name our son who was born last fall Archer, but I had a feeling it was trending, so we nixed the idea for a different name. I still love it though!

It's the commenters like @HOLLYP and @H L I who make this site unbearable sometimes.

HLI, then simply ignore and carry on.

the book Freakonomics has a fabulous chapter on how names become popular and their breakdown demographically etc. mind blowing.

Well, I'm sort of glad Alice is becoming popular. I got so tired of people mutating my name to Allison or Alyssa or whatever then-trendy variant. My poor older son was given the name Christopher (for no particular reason) then became part of a cohort moving through his school years that had many Christophers. They all ended up being Chris J, Chris H, etc based on their last names. He still mumbles about it occasionally. A lot of them hung out together, must have made it easy to get their attention.

I've never been able to find my given name on any novelty anything. On one hand it kind of sucked as a kid, because all my friends had that kind of stuff. On the other hand it meant I never was given crap just because it had my name on it. It balances out.
I would hate to think that whatever was popular would make any difference to what I would name a child. If you like it use it, even if it will be popular. It's not their name that will make them stand out.

Funny how parents are so obsessed with finding a unique name. I think most kids with unique names hate it and wish they had something more common (at least as kids, hopefully that changes in adulthood). I'm with @littlebird, as I could never find anything with both my somewhat uncommon name, let alone with the correct spelling of it. I grew up in the generation of Jennys, Christys, Katies, and for years wished i could have one of those names!
Of course no one will name a child Jennifer for years now. It's funny to think that in 50 years Jennifer will be an "old lady" name.
I am also of the firm belief that one should name a child what they want, who cares about popularity or trends?

I'm sad that Sophia is so popular, I'd really love to have a daughter with that name but I just can't get behind nam,ing your kid something so trendy. I don't want something unique, but I definitely don't want to pick the #1 name!

My name is "unique" to the point that no one can pronounce it properly the first time around, I'm always correcting others as they spell it and I just had everyone call me Mary all my life just to give them and myself a break from all of that. Whatever you do, just don't make it complicated for your kids, life is complicated enough.

Why is the La-a thing here? AT, you need to come get your cousins.

I named my dog Milo because I didn't think I'd meet many human versions on the street. Drat!

I don't have babies yet, but I think I'd just have to pick a name that I like, despite trends. I have a friend who named her daughter Mila, but she's Polish and it's a slavic name, so not necessarily chosen based on trendy names.

To the posters commenting about seeing posts that are not related to design and should be in the ohdeedoh section of apartment therapy, I think when Apartment Therapy changed stuff up they explained that there would still be separate sections (although ohdeedoh is now called family). If you go to apartmenttherapy.com's "main" section it will show all posts from all sections. If you click on separate ones you will only see those posts related to that section and so forth. Just giving you guys a heads up so you don't have to see stuff you don't want to see.

Correct me if I'm wrong, AT!

Dear curious3d,
I am sorry that you took my comment as an attention grab I did not mean it as such. I am a linguistics doctoral student minoring in computational linguistics, and the preliminary paper was looking at the function of Mock Ebonics in racial jokes. I already used snopes and the emails in my paper. I'm not sure what made you think I didn't look at that first.

The method that I used was to incrementally advance a google search by year. Pre 2008, there is no Le-A and Ledasha only appears on a Russian messageboard. Post 2008 is when the first evidence of Le-A occurs and there is a post. The morning after that first post there is another hit on a random messageboard, and it just flows from there. It also grew include A-a "adasha". Roughly a year after the election of Obama the line "And we let these people vote" is added. The main crux of my paper is looking at the various Mock Ebonics evolutions of "the dash ain't silent". Hopefully now you can eyeroll with a little more knowledge about it.

I only made that comment because as someone with an "ethnic" name I get annoyed to hear stereotypes trotted out about people who have these names and the parents that birthed them. It classist, racist and just downright mean. Ultimately it has little to do with the actual names but more about the societal status of the people that bear them.

I chose to name my daughter Elizabeth because it's a well known name that people can spell and it's also pretty uncommon to see little Elizabeths running around lol You can be unique without making up new names, is all I'm saying.

When we named our daughter Sophie 14 years ago people looked at us very strangely, asking if it was a family name that we were "obligated" to use. If I had known it would be so popular I would have pushed for Bronwyn.

Please, parents, stop naming your kids silly names. AT featured some room tours of kids with names like Nixon and Satchel.

Please, stop the madness. It makes your kid seem like a fashion accessory.

Does seem that lately there are more and more "fluff" posts that seem to dilute the great home interiors content. Even the Birthday Party stuff seems like it should be on TheKitchn instead.

LaceyLove I believe you are correct!

@heirloom, I feel the same way about my 15 year old Olivia. At the time people were puzzled. They kept saying, "Like Olivia Newton John?" As if!

Being Spanish I wonder how people pronounce Iker.. because the I should be pronounced like in 'film' and not like in iPad.. so it'd be something like 'eeker'.

Whoever wrote this post typed in the non-top 10 names specifically. The SSA website only lists the top 10 names and then you have to use the search feature to determine the rank of the rest. I wouldn't consider Abram, Dexter or Alice to be "trending" they just rose in rank slightly. For instance, with Abram: the name ranked 491 in 2009, dropped to 531 in 2010 and then rose again to 444 for 2011. Big whoop.

I cringe at posts like this. Name your kid a name that fits them and that you love. The only real trend is trying too hard to name them something that's "different" or "unique". What ever happened to choosing a child's name based on it's meaning, or at least what it means to you?

Of course, first and foremost, parents should choose a name that they love, and that they agree on, which can be hard enough on its own.

The idea of following trends is both to help prevent parents from choosing a name that is or will soon become more popular than they desired. I hear time and again stories from people like Sophie's mama. Of course this doesn't take away from the loveliness of Sophie, and her original choice was a good one made with love.

I also believe there is a correlation between design and things like what we name our children. Styles change over time, and some of us enjoy identifying and even trying to predict what those trends are. Just like neon or instagram, what is hot now will inevitably fall out of fashion at some point. It's not to take away from the individual or to function as a of substitute for making a deliberate, well thought out, personal choice.

@TEQUILA RED, I'm an Olivia and 27 years ago, when I was born, there was NONE in my general vicinity of Long Island. Now, it's the 4th most popular name! I sort of hate that. But, yes...I got the Olivia Newton-John comment ALL the time!

@H L I: there IS no more Ohdeedoh! Ohdeedoh always included information about style and trends in addition to decor and design. This is one of the most unfortunate results of the AT merger. Content that would've been warmly received by an interested audience at Ohdeedoh now goes up on the main page, and gets crapped on by people who don't know about the merger and think that AT should only feature photos of Eames chairs or something. (Can you tell I'm still hacked at AT for making such a terrible branding decision?)

I don't think my name will ever be popular, but I'm ok with that. However, it still drives me nuts that people can't spell Phoebe. Nor do they understand what I'm saying, both on the phone and in person. It's not that hard!

@Bowtruckleliz: I'm sorry but that's just ridiculous. Are you seriously trying to pass John as an uncommon name and Forest as this name everyone knows at least one in each house? John is still #27 on the boys chart, with more than 10,000 of them born last year - not to mention that its been popular forever, so you're more than likely to meet loads of Johns at a school - Forest is not and has never been a popular name, so it IS unique.

I'd never give my kid a common name, who wants to be James B or William D in a class - I know I wouldn't since that happened to me.

@mschatelaine: maybe you need to get out more. There are still loads of Davids, Marks, Andrews, James' around...

I actually love having a very traditional and common name 'Jane', but it's really surprising how few other Janes I meet. It's big as a middle name.

It baffles me when people try to spell my name by adding letters, like 'Jayne'. My favourite terrible spelling is 'Joolie' for Julie. Come on, the english language is taking a battering as it is without the nonsensical spelling of 'normal' names.

I named my kid after a penguin (Adelie). Seriously!

And for all you "Catherine's" out there:

"24 WAYS OF SPELLING"
taken from "Ripley's...Believe It Or Not!"

Katherine Katherin Kathrin Katharyn
Catherine Catherin Cathrin Catharyn
Katharine Katharin Kathrine Katharyne
Catharine Catharin Cathrine Catharyne
Kathryn Kathryne Katheryn Katheryne
Cathryn Cathryne Catheryn Catheryne

But we all know the only correct way is: CATHRYN (that's me!)

"In the moments that matter, even our own names are just sounds people make to tell us apart. What we are isn't that." -Joss Whedon

theres only one other person in the country with my daughters name and im so happy! classy yet noone uses it!