Personal question: are you having a baby soon? If so, have you considered calling it Dua or Lily? Or Caleb or Jesse? According to one of the UK’s leading parenting websites, pop star names will be fashionable this year. As will “cowboy” influenced names. The name “Butch” isn’t suggested in anything I can find online, but the likes of Luke and Austin apparently evoke “strength, adventure and Americana”, should you want to saddle your new son with a name that suggests he could grow up and start taking out foreign leaders without much consultation.
Baby names this year are also likely to be influenced by “aura points”, and I’ve spent some time this week trying to work out what this means so you don’t have to. Aura points, it seems, is an expression used by the yoof to describe an imaginary rating system. Do something hip and cool which earns you the approval of a 20-something? They may, conversationally, award you 100 aura points. Names associated with this baffling trend apparently include Asher, Esme and Jude. “These names balance sound with substance,” intones an expert, “offering positivity and personality in equal measure.” Eh? Doesn’t it make you just long for the days when someone had a baby and called it Mary or Fred? Although one friend of mine, who had a girl just before Christmas in 2024, did call her Mary, which I like very much. A shoo-in for the main role in the nativity when she starts school, one would hope.
The baby names debate rolls around every year and I was always delighted when Sophia was near the top because, my theory went, if there were more of us about then I might get less stick for having such a posh name. (Although I’ll admit, it’s not necessarily my first name that’s the problem). Except of course most Sophias, these days, are So-fee-a, not So-fire, like me, so really, the rise in the name’s popularity has only confused things further.
I once found myself alone in a green room with Peter Crouch and wanted to break the awkward silence. “I’m Sophia, like your daughter,” I blurted, at which point the footballer looked both nervous and confused, partly because I suspect his daughter is a So-fee-a. Although I see from the latest chart that, whichever way you pronounce it, we’ve dropped to 11th place, with Amelia claiming the number one spot, followed by Olivia. Muhammad and Noah, meanwhile, are in the top two spots for boys, but I think let’s not get into a debate about religion here.
As with any list ever published, whether for the top beauty products, most fashionable people or most popular baby names, I’m sceptical about the source material. That’s why, back in 2017, during a quiet winter afternoon at Tatler, my colleague Tibbs and I decided to have some fun with the baby names debate, come up with our own, entirely fabricated list, and stick it on the Tatler website. We wrote a list of names from A-Z for each sex, including the likes of Gethsemane, Koala, Euripides, Mao and Titus, although we threw in John, Kenneth and Wendy to balance it out. Also Npeter (where the “N” is silent) because it made us laugh. I don’t recall being drunk that day. We were just being extremely silly.
Click, publish, up our list went on the website, only for various news outlets to take us seriously and declare that Tatler, the “society bible”, believed that Gethsemane and Euripides were sensible names for babies that year. To this day, I worry that, somewhere in the world, there’s an eight-year-old boy saddled with the name Npeter, who constantly has to explain that the “N” is silent because his impressionable and upwardly-mobile parents were taken in by us. Little Npeter, if you exist, from someone who also has a tricky name to pronounce, I’m so sorry.
According to the births published in this August publication, last year’s most popular names were Clementine and George. Since 1969, an industrious Telegraph reader called Susan Cole has noted down the names published in the paper’s announcements every day, and kept a tally of them on record cards in a biscuit tin at her home in Surrey. She duly delivers them to the Telegraph office on New Year’s Eve. Isn’t that marvellous?
Traditional girls’ names such as Penelope and Daphne made a comeback last year, noted Ms Cole, while boys were more likely to be registered as less formal Charlie or Freddie, instead of Charles or Frederick. Although there were some more unusual names in the mix. Notably fewer Muhammads in the Telegraph births announcements last year, it seems, but a quick flick back through them throws up a Guinevere, a Montague and an Apollo. Also, a girl called Helena Freya Kora but “to be known as Strawberry”. Some very solid middle names, too. Nigel Marmaduke, for instance, and a boy called Ludovic, with Atticus and Gerald as his middle names, which is a marvellous combination. Although the award for the most outré baby name last year probably needs to go to a boy named Basil, with the middle names Groove and Blofeld. Basil, it was noted in the birth announcements, was a new brother for “Stanley Beats Scaramanga”. I promise you this is true. My pal Jez is his godfather.
I may be biased, but I love an unusual name. One of my closest friends has just had a gurgling boy and called him Xerxes. He’ll be a character. Not only because his parents both are, but because he’ll have to be with a name like that. Occasionally I’ve longed for something simpler which doesn’t cause people to look panicked, fearful of mispronouncing or forgetting it, when I introduce myself at a drinks party. But luckily my middle name has taught me forbearance in such moments, because it’s (genuinely) Patience.