The brutally honest guide to choosing baby names boy edition

There's a pervasive, highly destructive lie floating around the maternity wards and NCT classes of Britain, and it goes something like this: don't worry if you haven't picked a name yet, because the second they hand him to you, you'll look into his eyes and you'll just know. Please, as a father of twins who stared at two identical, furious, prune-faced strangers for three solid days before deciding what to call them, don't rely on this method. You won't look at your newborn and think, ah yes, a tiny, screaming Bartholomew. You will look at him and think he looks like a very angry Winston Churchill who has just been woken from a nap.

Picking a baby name is an exercise in psychological warfare, mostly with yourself, but also with every single person you've ever met who might harbor a secret, lifelong hatred of the name "Oliver" because an Oliver once stole their lunch money in Year 4. When we were sorting through lists for our girls, the sheer volume of vetoes was staggering, but when I look at the current landscape of baby names boys are being given today, the pressure seems entirely different. There's this bizarre modern expectation that your son’s name must simultaneously sound like a 19th-century blacksmith, a trendy Brooklyn barista, and a future CEO, all while perfectly complementing your surname and not spelling anything obscene in monogram format.

So let's strip away the romanticized nonsense. You're not going to be struck by lightning with the perfect moniker while walking through a meadow. You're going to sit on the sofa at 11pm, eating cold toast, aggressively scrolling through government registry data while your partner shoots down your favorite options one by one.

The absolute trap of the family group chat

I can't stress this enough: don't, under any circumstances, tell your extended family your short list. If there's one hill I'll happily perish on, it's the "Too Many Chefs" rule of naming a baby. People are profoundly incapable of keeping their initial reactions to themselves, and their reactions are almost exclusively unhelpful. If you tell your mother you're thinking of calling him Arthur, she won't say, "Oh, how lovely and vintage." She will say, "Arthur? Like my uncle Arthur who smelled of cabbage and ran off with the postwoman?" And just like that, the name is dead to you. You will never un-smell the imaginary cabbage.

Keep the list completely private until the ink on the birth certificate is dry. People are far less likely to insult a name when it's already attached to a living, breathing infant in front of them (though my great-aunt did manage a slightly horrified "Oh, right..." when we announced one of the twins' names, which I found deeply amusing in my sleep-deprived state).

Field testing your options in the wild

Before you commit to anything, you must subject the name to rigorous, highly unscientific real-world testing. First, write down the full initials in large, block letters on a piece of paper. Look at them from different angles. You might think Aaron Samuel Smith is a strong, classic choice, but you've just named your child A.S.S., and I promise you, secondary school children will notice this approximately three seconds after he walks into form time.

I also highly suggest the Costa Coffee test, which is where you go to a busy coffee shop, order a drink, and give the barista your potential baby name. When they shout it across a crowded room over the roar of an espresso machine, how does it sound? Does it sound like you're clearing your throat? Does the barista spell it with three unnecessary vowels? Does half the café turn around because they think you've yelled a command to a dog? If you've to repeat it three times to a teenager holding a paper cup, reconsider.

Honestly, nobody actually cares about the etymology of the name—I'm fairly certain nobody has ever gotten a job promotion because their name loosely translates to "brave wolf of the western valley" in Old Norse.

You also need to practice shouting the name in an angry whisper, because this is how you'll communicate with your child for the first five years of their life in public spaces. "Sebastian, put the pigeon down" takes too long to say. You need something punchy.

Equipping the tiny stranger

Once you actually settle on a name (or at least narrow it down to two options that won't result in him being shoved into a locker), the terrifying reality sets in that this hypothetically named child is arriving very soon, and he currently owns nothing but a rapidly expanding collection of tiny socks that will definitely get lost in the washing machine.

When you're packing the hospital bag for this impending arrival, you want things that are absurdly soft, mostly because newborn skin is ridiculous and seems to react to literally everything. We used the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit Sleeveless for the twins under basically every outfit. They're genuinely brilliant because the 95% organic cotton and 5% elastane mix means they actually stretch over a massive cloth nappy without you having to yank it so hard the poppers tear. They've got those envelope-style shoulders which, if you don't know yet, are specifically designed so that when the inevitable 'up-the-back' nappy explosion happens, you can pull the bodysuit down over their shoulders and legs instead of dragging it over their head and getting it in their hair. It's a feature that will save your sanity at 4am.

However, let me offer some deeply practical advice regarding the Baby Shorts Organic Cotton Ribbed Retro Style. They're incredibly cute. They have that vintage athletic trim that makes your kid look like a tiny 1970s tennis coach, and the organic cotton is fantastic for when they're crawling around on a rug. But for the love of all that's holy, buy the Mocha or Pale Turquoise color. Don't put an active infant in anything with white trim if you ever plan on taking them outside, because crawling babies are essentially tiny Roombas that collect pure dirt and mashed banana. The shorts are great, but dark colors are your only defense against the chaos.

If you're currently panic-buying hospital bag essentials while arguing with your partner about whether "Jasper" sounds too much like a cartoon villain, you might want to look at Kianao's baby blankets collection to distract yourself for a bit.

The trend paradox of the rustic aristocrat

If you look at the current data for baby names, it's fascinating and slightly absurd. The absolute titans of the charts—Liam, Noah, Oliver, Theodore, and James—refuse to budge. They're the immovable objects of the nursery. But bubbling underneath are these specific trends that millennial and Gen-Z parents are clinging to.

There's the "Rustic Aristocrat" trend, which I find endlessly amusing. Parents are digging up names like Arthur, Otis, Walter, and Leopold. It's as if we all collectively decided we want our sons to sound like minor characters in a Thomas Hardy novel who own a small piece of woodland and a tweed waistcoat. It's a massive overcorrection from the 90s trend of naming boys after random surnames.

Then you've the sharp consonant brigade—Axel, Ezra, Maddox, Enzo. Names that sound fast and slightly dangerous, like a brand of expensive European sports car. And of course, the nature names. River, Forest, Rowan, Sage. I honestly quite like these, though you do run the risk of sounding like you're listing Yankee Candle scents if you put too many of them together in a family.

The absolute trap of matching siblings

Speaking of families, let's talk about the "sib-set" dilemma. I see parents agonizing over whether a new baby's name perfectly matches the older sibling's name, as if they're curating an art exhibition rather than raising human beings. "We have a Jasper, so we must have a Silas, we can't possibly have a Kevin."

Matching sibling names is purely for the benefit of personalized holiday cards. By the time they're teenagers, nobody is going to care that their names don't flow seamlessly into one another. My twins have names that stylistically go together, but that was a happy accident; mostly we were just trying to find two names that we didn't actively hate. Don't sacrifice a name you love just because it doesn't sound like it belongs in the same cinematic universe as your first child.

Surviving the teething phase regardless of what you call him

Whatever you end up calling him, there will come a point around month five or six where his name becomes irrelevant, because he will stop responding to it and instead transform into a furious, drooling gargoyle. Teething is a dark time. I remember holding one of my girls in the kitchen at 2am, whispering her beautifully chosen name while she tried to gnaw through my actual collarbone because the NHS-approved dose of Calpol hadn't quite kicked in yet.

This is when you stop caring about aesthetics and start caring about survival. The Panda Teether Silicone Baby Bamboo Chew Toy is one of the very few things I'll aggressively suggest to new parents. The flat design is the key here. So many teethers are these thick, chunky rings that a baby can't really get into the back of their mouth where the molars are trying to erupt, or they drop them every five seconds because their fine motor skills are basically zero. The panda shape means they can genuinely grip it themselves, and the bamboo textured bit provides enough resistance to massage the gums. Chuck it in the fridge for ten minutes while you're making a coffee, hand it over, and you might just get five minutes of blessed silence where nobody is crying (including you).

Before we get into the wildly specific questions people ask me about naming conventions, you should probably sort out what this hypothetically named child is going to chew on and wear. Grab some genuinely useful organic baby clothes and stop staring at the top 100 list until your eyes bleed.

The questions I seriously get asked

Do we've to have a middle name? I can't even think of one name, let alone two.
No, you really don't. Middle names are mostly used by parents as a warning system when a child is about to cross a road without looking or has drawn on the walls. If you yell their first and middle name together, they know they've crossed a line. But legally and practically, no one cares. If you're exhausted, just skip it. He won't mind.

What if we pick a name and then realize it's in the top 10 most popular list?
Then he will be one of three Liams in his reception class, and he will survive. The panic about having a "unique" name is vastly overblown. If a name is popular, it's usually because it's a very good name. It's much better to be one of three Olivers than to be the only child in the school named after an obscure 14th-century gardening implement just because your parents wanted you to stand out.

My wife is due in three weeks, we hate each other's lists, what do we do?
Print out the top 500 list. You each get a red pen. Cross out everything you actively despise. Whatever is left in the middle that isn't covered in red ink is your safety pool. You might not find a name you're passionately in love with, but you'll find a name you can both tolerate, and honestly, in a long marriage, mutual tolerance of a decision is basically a massive win.

Is it weird to name a boy after his mother's maiden name?
Not at all. In fact, using surnames as first names is heavily trending (your Parkers, your Brooks, your Harrisons). If your partner's maiden name works as a first name, it's a brilliant way to dodge the argument over whose family gets "honored" in the naming process. Just make sure the initials don't spell P.I.G. before you finalize it.