Having trouble choosing the perfect name to carry your child through every season of life? Naming your baby is a major decision, no doubt, and if you need help with landing on the perfect moniker, perhaps science can steer you in the right direction.
My 1st Years partnered with University of Birmingham Associate Professor of Cognitive Linguistics, Dr. Bodo Winter, to perform a study on scientific principles that could potentially indicate how beautiful-sounding a name is. Although their research only focused on the most popular names in the United States and the United Kingdom, they found that certain principles of linguistics and psychological phenomenons do seem to make certain names sound more appealing to our ears.
The publication and the linguistics expert teamed up to rank this year’s most popular baby names in the US and UK according to the linguistic theory of iconicity, or sound symbolism, to ultimately determine the top 50 boy and girl names that are the most phonetically appealing, and therefore the most beautiful-sounding.
Dr. Winter explained, “Using an exciting piece of sound symbolism research from Adelman et al. as a starting point, we scored a number of the world’s most popular baby names in order to rank them. The names that ranked the most highly provoked the most positive emotions when spoken out loud and therefore are likely to sound most beautiful to the human ear.”
He continued to describe how phonetics influences the naming of a child, saying, “For example, research by Stephanie Shih shows that parents try to avoid choosing first names that would clash with their family names. If your family name starts with ‘S,’ such as Scott, Smith, Saunders, or Sullivan, it may be advisable not to have a first name that ends in ‘s,’ such as Marcus, Charles, or Nicolas – because the two ‘s’ sounds will blend into each other.”
Dr. Winter explained another phenomenon that influences name choices among parents, saying, “In another recent paper, Berger and colleagues found… that when there are major hurricanes in the US, the next generation of babies will be more likely to feature sounds that occur in the name of the hurricane, such as Katie after Hurricane Katrina.”
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He continued, “This seems surprising at first: nobody would want to name their child after a devastating natural disaster, of course! But when a particularly dangerous hurricane wreaks havoc over a country, the name of the hurricane will be mentioned again and again in the media. This means that we are exposed more to the same sounds, and it is known from psychological research that things that are more familiar to us are generally liked more, a phenomenon known as the ‘mere exposure effect.’ As a result, the speech sounds contained in hurricane names are actually more likely to crop up in names of the next generation.”
So there you have it — science can technically rate how beautiful-sounding a name is, but there are more factors that make a name beautiful than just what it sounds like to our ears. For example, naming a child after a loved one makes a name beautiful beyond its sound. Giving your baby a name that resonates with you makes it beautiful. The cultural significance of a name can make it beautiful. There are many factors that go into the “beauty” of a name, so don’t let the science of it all make you sweat too much — simply choose a name that’s beautiful to you.
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