What's in a name?

When I became a father 3 months back, I had no idea how difficult it was going to be to find a name for my daughter. After all, I have succeeded in giving wonderful (I think so) names to other's kids in the past. How difficult could it be to name my own kid? From what I have learnt in the last few months, a lot. I and my wife had a clear idea of the kind of name we wanted for our baby. However, her idea was completely different from mine :-)

These days, there are a number of avenues available to search for names. There are the good old books, there is the Internet and of course, there are relatives. Relatives suggested names from various places. Some worked as teachers and they remembered the names of all the kids in their class, some suggested names from TV serials, some suggested names they had heard, names of kids of their friends and so on. We read through a couple of "Baby names" books and went through a number of websites.

One of the main problems in reaching a conclusion is that we want a name that has a nice meaning, or at least not have a bad meaning. These days it is easy to choose a cute, sweet name for your baby, having heard it somewhere among your relatives and later realize that the name actually means "lunatic". Most baby name websites publish meanings of the names. However, the meanings are either whatever was given by contributors to the website, or given by whoever among their employees was free when the name was added to the site. It is not uncommon to see a name that doesn't mean anything, but someone in some website says it has some meaning in Hebrew. Or Icelandic.

It was very difficult to find names that was acceptable to both me and my wife and also had a nice meaning. We have not even bothered to get a consensus from other stakeholders. After a lot of effort, we have narrowed down to a small list of names. Next weekend is the deadline before which we need to narrow it down to just one name. Wish me luck please. And never underestimate the complexity of the process of naming your baby.