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？