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An exhausted pregnant woman staring blankly at a list of baby names on her phone

The 3 AM Meltdown That Finally Taught Me How to Name a Human

It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday in mid-August, and the air conditioning in our apartment had completely surrendered. I was 37 weeks pregnant with Maya, wearing my husband Mark’s hopelessly stained college lacrosse t-shirt, and I was crying so...

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Exhausted British dad looking at a laptop spreadsheet of rare daughter monikers while holding two bottles.

My 3am breakdown over finding genuinely rare monikers for daughters

It was 3:14 in the morning, the glow of my MacBook illuminating the half-eaten Hobnob resting dangerously close to my wife's massive, third-trimester bump. We were locked in a vicious, whispered argument over whether "Lyra" sounded too much like "liar"...

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Exhausted father staring at a baby name book while holding a cup of lukewarm tea.

The Absurd Quest for Baby Boy Names Unique Enough Not to Be Steve

My mother-in-law cornered me by the kettle at week twelve of the pregnancy to insist that strong, traditional English names like Arthur or George were the only guaranteed way to prevent a child from a life of petty criminality, while...

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Exhausted dad in a London registry office holding twins wrapped in blankets

The Agony of Choosing Unique Baby Girl Names at the Registry

The pen was hovering over the official birth registration form, my hand physically shaking, and not just because I was running on four minutes of broken sleep and half a stale Hobnob. We were sitting in the fluorescent purgatory of...

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A sleep-deprived dad staring at a spreadsheet of baby boy names on his laptop

Decoding baby names for boys: A dad's naming algorithm

Line 74 of my Google Sheet was flashing neon green. I'd written a custom script to highlight any moniker with a standard deviation of less than 5% in popularity over the last decade, filtering out anything that spiked due to...

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A stressed pregnant mom looking at baby name lists on a clipboard.

The Absolute Messy Truth About Finding Unique Baby Names in 2024

I was thirty-two weeks pregnant, sitting at the nurse station at Northwestern Memorial, staring blankly at a patient chart. The poor kid had a name with five consecutive consonants and a silent q. My shift was ending, my ankles looked...

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Confused dad looking at a spreadsheet of baby names while holding a teething infant in Portland.

How The AGT Winner Jessica Sanchez Baby Name Wrecked My Math

Don't, under any circumstances, try to write a Python script that scrapes the Social Security Administration database to find a moniker with a mathematically perfect syllable-to-vowel ratio. This is a terrible way to name a human. I know this because...

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A stressed mom looking at a baby name book on her kitchen counter.

How to Pick a Girl Baby Name When Everyone Has an Opinion

I was thirty-two weeks pregnant with my second, sweating through my maternity leggings at a baby shower I didn't even want to have, staring at a plate of lukewarm spinach dip while three different women cornered me about names. My...

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