Thursday, May 5, 2011

Least Liked Baby Names

As far as baby names go, it's dangerous territory when you start raggin' on people's precious little miracles. But we’re gonna do it anyway.

Laura Wattenberg is the author of a baby name book called "The Baby Name Wizard", and instead of running the usual studies to find out which baby names are most popular, she went the other direction and found did a national survey to find out which names are disliked.

For boys, names with an "aiden" sound dominated the list. The top four most disliked are Jayden, Brayden, Aiden, and Kaden and Hayden came in sixth. The rest of the top 10 are Hunter coming in fifth, then Bentley seventh, then Tristan, Michael, and Jackson.

For girls, the most disliked name was the ever-controversial Nevaeh. That's "heaven" backwards. The rest of the list includes Madison, Mackenzie, McKenna, Addison, Gertrude, Kaitlyn, Makayla, Bertha, and Hope.

Wattenberg's study also found some trends about disliked names. Usually the names that came out of nowhere to become popular experience a backlash. So do masculine names that suddenly become feminine, and weird spellings.

Some people go the other direction and just hate traditional names, which is how a name like Michael made the top 10.

According to the most recent Social Security Administration data, in 2009, the most popular boys' baby names were Jacob, Ethan, and Michael . . . and for girls it was Isabella, Emma, and Olivia.

2 comments:

  1. Growing up I attended 3 different high schools, from Northern NY to Dunedin FL. Some classmates made fun of my name "it's different". I alway loved my name. No matter where I traveled I was always a ONE AND ONLY. Well, not anymore. I hear my name everywhere. I can even buy trinkets with my name printed on... I used to have to "special order" them.
    And now all those who picked on me have children and grandchildren with MY name... OLIVIA

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  2. My daughter is named Madison and she is a blue eyed, blonde beautiful 7yr old! And we love her name! ~ Mindy

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