- Current projects? Deadlines? Opportunities?
- Anything of interest happening?
1.
In 1999, David and Victoria Beckham decided to call their son Brooklyn, partly inspired by the area of New York. It was thought of as a little unusual at the time in the English-speaking world, but in recent years, parents — whether famous or not — have begun to get creative with the names of their children.
2.
While some parents may still use the name of a grandparent, or search through baby name books, others might be looking at Google Maps.
(1)Is your name common in your country? How did your parents choose it?
(2)What are your parents’ names? Are their names still popular today?
3. Luggage storage company Bounce decided to find out how travel might be impacting baby name choices. It looked at baby name data from official sources in the UK and the US between 2000 and 2020 and made a list of names that may have been inspired by travel.
4.
The most popular boys’ names in the US with a link to travel were Preston, Dakota and Israel. While it might seem strange to residents of Preston, a small city in the northwest of England, 56,922 babies in the US were named after their home between 2000 and 2020.
(1)Do you know anyone with a unique or interesting name?
(2)Do you know anyone who recently had a baby? What did they name him or her?
5.
For UK boys, Preston came second, between Chester, another city in England, and Phoenix, which is the name of a city in Arizona. The top girls’ names on the list in the US were Sydney, Alexandria — one of Egypt’s largest cities — and London. In the UK they were Florence, Skye and India.
6.
However, Bounce couldn’t know exactly why parents chose their children’s names. For example, a girl named Skye may have been named after Scotland’s Isle of Skye. But her parents could also have named her after someone else called Skye, or just heard the name and liked it.