I have spent a lot of time thinking about baby names for girls over the last few years, and rightly so…I have had two little females to name in that time, and it’s not a job I take lightly! Your little ones will live with these names for the rest of their lives, it will probably be the first word they learn to write, they will hear it over and over for eternity…and you will be yelling it at the top of your lungs most days for decades! People also judge you based on your name, make assumptions about your background, intelligence, behaviour, even how nice you are…I read an anonymous questions feed for teachers a while back and so many of them admitted to instantly disliking certain children based on their names! Some also believed they could tell immediately how naughty a child would be based on their name!
I am no expert on the meaning or connotations of a name, what someone might deduce from it about your child, and part of me thinks to hell with them. If someone is going to judge your child because they once knew a naughty kid by the same name they sound like a bit of an idiot to me!
What was important to me when choosing names was that they were established names, I know it is very on trend at the moment to create a totally unique name, or recycle a pretty word and use it as a name (Hailiah, Bunny, North, Apple) but I worried that even the very practice would eventually become dated, and to have an extraordinary name would one day be a bit yawn. But on the other hand…I didn’t want a really ordinary name. Unusual. I wanted unusual. But an actual name. I wanted nobody to have the same name as my girls at school, I wanted to avoid the top 50 most popular names in the country, but I wanted them to not feel that their names were weird.
I named my daughters April and Ariel…I have never met anyone with those names before, but know of people throughout history and popular culture that have had those names…they are not for everybody, no name ever is, but I still absolutely adore them and sometimes wonder what I would ever call a third daughter if I ever had one. So I’ve compiled a list of really pretty, established, but unusual girl’s names for anybody who is looking for just that!
Anya
Fern
Audrey
Martha
Heidi
Lilith
Lauretta
Primrose
Sasha
Clarissa
Emmeline
Ada
Layla
June
Angelina
Cora
Faye
Blythe
Nina
Ina
I have checked and checked again, none of these are in the current top 50 names for girls in the UK so there’s a good chance baby won’t be sharing a name with three other kids in their class! Hurrah! They are also all beautiful (to me…obviously not everyone will agree) and tick all my boxes, hope this has served as inspiration for somebody, from one mother of girls to another!
x
Kate
