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Home › Articles › Naming Baby › Baby Names As Creative As You Are

Baby Names As Creative As You Are

Unique Ways to Pick Baby's Name

By Shannon McKelden

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Zaria (after an Islamic emerite in Nigeria) Yasmeen (Arabic for "jasmine")
Azaad (Arabic for "freedom") Jibril (Arabic name for the angel Gabriel, may God be pleased with him)
Che (after her husband who is named after Che Guavera) Kenyatta (means "flaming spear")
Yusuf (Arabic for the prophet Joseph, may God's peace and blessing be upon him) Baraak (Arabic for "blessed") Ihsaan (Arabic for "excellence")

In choosing her children's names, it was very important to Ben and her husband that they have names that reflected the faith in which they would raise them. "I wanted them to have names with attributes to aspire to as they grow, God willing," Ben says. "Only one of my children does not have a 'traditional' Islamic name."

How Do You Say That?
When choosing a name, be careful not make it so difficult that your child's name will constantly be mispronounced.

This was a problem for Katie-Anne Gustafson, who is from the United Kingdom but who now lives in Eskilstuna, Sweden, with her husband. Their first son's name, Jakob, is common in the U.K., but in Sweden is pronounced Yakob. This pronunciation, in Gustafson's mind, "conjures up pictures of a 6-year-old rabbi."

They were more careful with son No. 2. But many common names from the U.K. didn't work. "[Most] were dismissed ... as being too difficult, too different, too unpronounceable for the Swedish culture [in which] our son would be raised," Gustafson says.

Finally Gustafson wrote "Connor" on a piece of paper. "I held it up to Mikael [my husband] ... and said, 'What does that say?'" she says. "When he pronounced it correctly, Gustafson was sold. "[He] got it the first time. That means Swedish people will get it and it's a name that I think reflects my heritage!"

Outside Opinions
With all the name options you and your spouse come up with, you'll also have friends and relatives offering their opinions – sometimes forcefully. Turner recommends not being swayed or pushed to choose a name because a parent or relative likes it. "Don't be bullied," she says. "Go with the name that you love and that represents the love you have for your child."

Dan Mencher and his wife, Miranda, of Queens, N.Y., picked out names prior to even getting pregnant. Of course, their ideas for the perfect name were not the same. By Miranda's 5th month of pregnancy, they decided to try a truly unique approach: Mencher started The Daddy Chronicles.


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