What's in a name ?

Recently, whilst researching popular children's names for a ceremony when I stumbled across the National statistics site.  Here it is possible to look at the trends in babies names over the decades.

The most up to date published figures are for 2017 and are based on over 679,000 live births.  

I started by searching for my own name and found that only 30 girls had been named Christine in 2017. 

Top boys names are

• Oliver
  
• Harry
  
• George
  
• Noah
  
• Jack

Top girls names are

• Olivia
• Amelia
• Isla
• Ava
• Emily

Looking further it seems there are also regional differences for instance the most popular boys name in North West London is David.  The name Hari features strongly in Wales but doesn't make the overall top 100.

There were 63,000 unique names registered in 2017.

All of which I find quite fascinating.

I remember my youngest son was known as "Baby O'Malley" for over a week for despite having a shortlist none of the names seemed to fit once he had arrived.  However, he has been very happy with the name we eventually settled on and it has served him well.

So did you have any dilemmas when choosing your child's name ?