The Google Sheet That Nearly Broke Us: A Guide to Baby Girl Names

Row 47 of our shared Google Sheet was where my marriage nearly met its untimely end over the name 'Blythe'. My wife, heavily pregnant and radiating a sort of exhausted menace, argued that it sounded literary and sophisticated. I argued that it sounded like a Victorian ghost who haunts a drafty coastal manor, which didn't seem entirely fair to push onto a child who would eventually have to survive secondary school in modern London. When the NHS sonographer casually ran the wand over my wife’s stomach three weeks later and confirmed we were having twins, the terrifying reality set in: we didn't just need one name for a baby girl, we needed two.

Naming a human being is an absurd amount of pressure, compounded by the fact that you've to stare at a tiny, wrinkled potato of a person and decide what they should be called when they're a forty-year-old accountant. The internet is littered with lists of unique names for baby girls, most of which sound like either pharmaceutical brands or minor characters from Lord of the Rings. If you're currently wading through this particular swamp of indecision, I can only offer you the chaotic, highly subjective lessons I learned while trying to find cute baby girl names that wouldn't make my daughters resent me.

The family opinion embargo

There's a massive, catastrophic mistake you can make early in the naming process, and it usually happens after half a glass of wine at a Sunday roast when you decide to float a few options past your parents. I'm begging you to keep your mouth firmly shut. The moment you share a potential name with extended family, they stop seeing it as a gift you're giving your child and start seeing it as a suggestion box they're legally required to empty.

My mum has a very specific face she makes when she strongly disapproves of something—it’s a sort of tight-lipped grimace usually reserved for poorly made tea or a delayed train at King's Cross. When I foolishly suggested 'Maeve' as a potential option, she deployed this face instantly, followed by a long, painful anecdote about a girl she knew in 1974 named Maeve who stole her favourite cardigan. Suddenly, a perfectly nice, vintage-sounding name was dead in the water because of a fifty-year-old knitwear grievance. Your family won't hold back. They will tell you that 'Aria' sounds like a dog's name, or that 'Eleanor' is too boring, or they'll helpfully suggest you name the baby after Great-Aunt Mildred, a woman who famously smelled of boiled cabbage and spite.

Keeping the names a complete secret until the ink is dry on the birth certificate is the only way to protect your sanity. Once the baby is actually here, swaddled and breathing, nobody is going to look at that tiny face and tell you they hate the name. They will swallow their cardigan-related grudges and pretend they loved it all along.

The catastrophic initials oversight

You can spend six months agonizing over the melodic flow of a first name and a middle name, completely forgetting to write the whole thing down next to your surname. I know a bloke who genuinely almost named his daughter Penelope Irene Gibson before his wife furiously scribbled the initials P.I.G. on a napkin in the middle of a Pizza Express. We nearly fell into a similar trap with our second twin. It's frighteningly easy to accidentally saddle your child with initials that spell out mild profanities, governmental agencies, or medical acronyms.

This is further complicated if you're trying to hyphenate your surnames, a noble and modern endeavor that inevitably leaves your kid sounding like a posh firm of solicitors. The trick, which we figured out around month seven when panic had fully set in, is to write the full name out in sloppy handwriting, type it into an email signature, and mentally project it onto a university degree certificate. If it survives all three environments without making you wince, you might actually have a winner.

A brief note on matching names

I'll say exactly one thing about giving twins matching names that start with the same letter or rhyme: absolutely don't do it unless you want to spend the next eighty years apologizing to two people who are already forced to share a birthday, a buggy, and a genetic sequence.

Visualising the reality of the child

What finally broke our deadlock wasn't another scroll through a database of unique girl names, but rather trying to visualise the actual child in our actual house. We started looking at the things we were buying for them. You find yourself projecting a personality onto a baby that doesn't exist yet, which is completely unhinged but surprisingly helpful.

For instance, my wife bought this incredibly sweet Flutter Sleeve Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit online. I remember holding up this tiny, earth-toned ruffled thing in our living room and thinking, 'Right, who wears this?' We pictured a little girl tearing around the garden, covered in mud but still looking vaguely angelic in those flutter sleeves. It helped us narrow down our vibe from 'Victorian ghost' to something a bit more earthy and resilient. As a quick aside, if you're buying newborn clothes, this bodysuit is actually brilliant. Most baby clothes seem designed to be as difficult as possible to put on a squirming infant at 3am, but the poppers on this one make sense, and the organic cotton means Twin A didn't break out in that weird, mysterious red rash that synthetic fabrics always seem to cause behind her knees. We ended up buying a few more just to survive the great weaning stains of 2023.

When you start attaching a name to a physical object—a bodysuit, a tiny pair of socks, the space in the back of your car where the car seat goes—it stops being an abstract concept on a spreadsheet. It becomes a person. That was how we finally settled on names that felt right; we just kept saying them out loud while folding miniature laundry until they stuck.

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The bizarre phenomenon of name regret

I always assumed "name regret" was a dramatic concept invented by people with too much time on their hands, right up until the second night in the hospital when I looked at Twin B and thought, I don't think you're who we said you're.

During one of our early check-ups, our health visitor—while aggressively weighing a screaming Twin B—casually muttered something about how a surprising chunk of parents seriously legally change their baby's name in the first six months. Apparently, the paperwork is alarmingly simple in those early days. I remember finding this information both incredibly liberating and deeply terrifying, because it meant I was entirely capable of waking up sleep-deprived on a Tuesday and renaming my daughters after obscure European cheeses. You're running on roughly four minutes of sleep and subsisting entirely on stale biscuits; your judgment is fundamentally compromised. Give it a few weeks before you decide you've made a terrible mistake. Usually, they just need to grow into it.

We did try to force the issue early on by buying things to cement the names in our brains. I bought the Gentle Baby Building Block Set because I had this grand vision of spelling out their newly chosen names for a cute photo to send to my cardigan-stealing mother. It turns out these specific blocks don't have the alphabet on them; they just have numbers and little embossed fruits. Which is fine. They're lovely, squishy, pastel blocks, and entirely safe when Twin A inevitably lobs one directly at Twin B's head during a dispute over a rice cake. They even squeak a bit. But they're completely useless for monogramming. We just piled the fruit blocks next to their heads and sent the photo anyway.

Testing the name in the wild

There's a final hurdle every name must clear, and it's the playground test. Before you commit, you must go to an empty park, stand by the swings, and yell the name at the top of your lungs, imagining that your toddler is currently trying to consume a handful of fox poo. If you feel entirely ridiculous shouting "Persephone, drop the stick!" then you've the wrong name.

You will be saying this name roughly four thousand times a day for the next decade. Though, to be brutally honest, whatever lovely, unique baby girl name you eventually select, you won't honestly use it for the first two years. You will mostly just call them "mate," "the baby," or "oi," whilst desperately trying to pry your keys out of their grip.

In fact, most of my current conversations with my daughters consist of me saying their names in a warning tone while waving a Panda Teether at them. When the molars come in—a developmental phase I'm fairly certain was designed by medieval torturers—names become irrelevant. You just slide the silicone panda across the floor like a hostage negotiator and pray for peace. But one day, they'll have teeth, and they'll go to school, and the name you agonised over on a Google Sheet will just be who they're.

It feels impossible right now, but eventually, you’ll look at her and realise she couldn't possibly be called anything else. Even if it's Blythe.

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Questions you're probably losing sleep over

Should we use family names as a middle name?
Only if you genuinely like the family member and the name doesn't sound like a Victorian ailment. We used a family middle name for one twin and completely ignored the other side of the family for the second twin. It caused a brief period of awkwardness at Christmas, but frankly, I’d rather endure a chilly December dinner than saddle my kid with 'Ethel' just to keep the peace.

What if my partner and I completely disagree on the vibe?
This is where the spreadsheet genuinely helps, provided you don't use it as a weapon. Have each person write down twenty names, without seeing the other's list. You cross-reference them to see if there's literally any crossover, even if it's just a shared letter. If she wants 'Aurelia' and you want 'Jane', you might have to compromise in the middle with something like 'Alice'. It's basically a hostage negotiation.

Is it a bad thing if the name we love is in the top ten most popular?
I used to think this was a disaster, imagining my kid being known as 'Emma T.' for her entire school career. But honestly? Popular names are popular because they're nice names. If you love Olivia, just call her Olivia. The stress of trying to find a name so profoundly unique that no one has ever heard it usually just results in a child who has to spell her name out phonetically every time she books a dentist appointment.

How long do we legally have to name the baby?
In the UK, the government generously gives you 42 days (or 21 days in Scotland, because the Scots apparently have less patience for indecision) to officially register the birth and the name. You don't have to have it decided before you leave the hospital, no matter how aggressively the midwife hovers with a clipboard. You can take the baby home, stare at it for a month, and then decide.

What happens if we tell people the name and they hate it?
Let them hate it. Their hatred is entirely irrelevant. The only people who have to shout this name across a crowded soft-play centre are you and your partner. If Aunt Susan thinks 'Luna' sounds like a cat, Aunt Susan is welcome to go buy a cat and name it whatever she wants. Stand your ground.