Naming

Here is an awesome website: The Baby Name Wizard

[edit - just noticed that Eric suggested this site in comment to yesterday's post, after I published this post - great minds think alike, it seems!]

It's the online version of the book of the same name, written by a woman named Laura Wittenberg. She has done a huge amount of research, in somewhat of an academic way, to track baby names. There are three key areas of the site:

• Name Mapper, which shows name trends over time tracked on a map of the US. You can rearrange the table based upon population density, income, political affiliation or state profile, so it's easy to find out where a name is popular. For example, you may not want a name that is popular in the South, you might want to avoid a name that is most popular in your own state or you might prefer names that are favoured in states that vote democrat.
  
• Name Voyager, which tracks overall trends of a name over time. It will plot multiple names and goes all the way back to the 1880s. A handy tool to see whether a name is fading from prominence or had its day at some point in the past.
• Namipedia, which is the usual meaning, derivation and alternate forms portal. There is an additional feature here though that allows you to do an advanced search based upon criteria such as syllables, whether the name is a fad, whether it is from Jewish or Muslim cultures or about 15 other choices. Quite useful if you're totally stuck.
  

Although it's extremely interesting, it hasn't really helped us that much, except to kick one girl name to the kerb that turned out to be far more popular than we thought. Most of the names on our lists haven't featured in the SSA top 1000 ever, so can't be tracked on the Baby Name Wizard site. Those that can are all ranked at least 200 or lower, so fall into the category of "statistically irrelevent". But for parents who are looking at a number of conventional names, this would be highly useful.