When I was pregnant with my son, my husband and I scoured baby name books trying to come up with just the right name for our child. While we settled early on the first name Zachary, finding a middle name wasn't quite as easy. Should we pick something trendy or traditional? Something honoring a family member (who, and on which side)? Something that just sounded good? We settled on Nathaniel, both because we thought it went well with the first name and also because my husband was a graduate student in American Literature at the time and spent many hours on the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Growing up, however, I don't remember middle names being such a big deal. Most of my friends and cousins had simple ones like Mary or Ann.

My, have times changed.

"There was a time when almost every girl had a single-syllable connective middle name like Lynn, Ann, Beth, Lee – and parents rarely thought out of that box," says Linda Rosenkrantz, co-author of The Baby Name Bible (St. Martin's Griffin, 2007) and Cool Names for Babies (St. Martin's Griffin, 2008). "With boys then the first and middle name were almost interchangeable – it was Robert Steven or Steven Robert, David Michael or Michael David. It has changed for both sexes as parents give a lot more thought to their middle name choices."

Jennifer Moss, author of The One-In-A-Million Baby Name Book (Perigee, 2008), speculates that today's parents-to-be are being exposed to more options. "I think in general people are getting more creative with baby naming, maybe because the Internet gives them many more choices and opinions of people that aren't in the parent's normal circle of friends and family," she says.

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