How to Choose a Baby Name You'll Both Love

Naming a person is a strange task. You're choosing on behalf of someone you haven't met, a word they'll hear more than any other, and you're doing it with an audience of relatives who all have opinions. Most of the difficulty isn't finding names you like. It's cutting down, and agreeing.

Say it out loud, in the voice you'll actually use

Names live in speech, not on paper. Say each one across a room. Say it as a full name the way it'll be said at a school assembly. Say it the way you'd say it when you're exasperated — the two-syllable, slightly sharp version. Plenty of names that look wonderful written down turn out to be awkward to shout, and you will be shouting it.

Pay attention to where the first name ends and the surname begins. A first name ending in the sound the surname starts with tends to slur together: the join disappears and you get one long word.

Check the obvious things once, then stop

Initials, rhymes, and whatever the internet will inevitably do with it — check them, then move on. It's easy to spend weeks hunting for a name nobody could ever tease, and no such name exists. Children are inventive. A name that survives five minutes of deliberate effort is fine.

Separate "I like this name" from "I like this name for our child"

These feel identical and aren't. There are names you admire on other people, names you associate with a book or a friend, and names you can picture on a specific small person in your house. Only the last group belongs on the shortlist. A useful test: imagine introducing the baby at a family gathering. Some names go slightly stiff in your mouth when you try it.

Decide how you feel about popularity, deliberately

Popularity isn't good or bad, but drifting into it by accident tends to cause regret. A very common name means your child is rarely misspelled and occasionally one of three in a class. A rare name means the opposite: distinctive, and a lifetime of spelling it out on the phone. Both are fine choices; what stings is only realising which one you made afterwards.

If it matters to you, check current popularity data for your country before committing. National statistics agencies publish this annually and it's free.

Try the shortlist on for a week

Pick your top two or three and use them. Refer to the bump by one name for a few days, then switch. You'll notice things no amount of list-staring reveals: which one you reach for without thinking, which one you keep having to correct yourself on, which one a partner quietly starts using too.

When you disagree

Disagreement is the normal case, not a warning sign. A few things help:

• Veto rather than campaign. Give each person a small number of absolute vetoes, used without having to justify them. It's faster than debating, and it protects the one name someone genuinely can't live with.
• Trade first and middle. One person's favourite as the first name, the other's as the middle, is the oldest compromise there is and it works.
• Vote separately, compare after. Run the same list through a bracket independently. You'll usually find you agree on more than the argument suggested, and the real disagreement is narrower than it felt.
• Don't decide tired. Name conversations at eleven at night go badly. This is reliably true.

Keep family opinions downstream of the decision

Asking relatives to help choose invites them to have a stake in the outcome, and then someone is disappointed. Collect suggestions early if you want them, decide privately, and announce rather than consult. A shared session is good for the collecting part — everyone can add names from their own phone, and you're under no obligation to shortlist any of them.

Accept that certainty may not arrive

Some parents get a thunderbolt. Most don't, and quietly worry that the absence of one means they've chosen wrong. It doesn't. The name becomes right by being used — attached to a real person, said thousands of times, it stops being a choice and starts being them. Pick the one you like best today and let the rest take care of itself.