Just starting a thread for a discussion of names. I’ll start.
My name could be either a boy or a girl. As a younger person, the most famous person with this name was a guy. I’m not. In high school, I routinely was assigned to boys physical education on my schedule and needed to get that changed. Which was ridiculous.
I worked in public education. At one point in time, we only had two kindergarten classes. We had three Sarah and three Jennifer, and a couple had the same last name initial. Both were the most common names for girls that year.
We chose names for our kids what we didn’t think were all that common, and we have continued to be correct. We also are not fond of nicknames so chose names that either didn’t have a common nickname option, or had one we could deal with.
In my last few years of work, I had a lot of unfamiliar, but nice sounding names…that I had to learn to spell!
Since H and I both come from French backgrounds (French Canadian and French Moroccan) we chose first names for our 3 kids that are French or have French association.
Their middle names all have some reference to a (their) grandparent. One of them actually has the same first name as a grandparent!
My name is a (boring) typical late 50’s-early 60’s name). It’s fine.
My HS graduation class was over 1000 students. I was the only student with my first name in that class. The college I went to for freshman year had about 900 students and I was the only one with my first name. The town PO served the college. You could address something to just my first name, and the town/state and it easily got to me.
DH and I both have fairly uncommon names; we gave our children traditional names that aren’t used all that often but are familiar. Only one of them has ever had anyone else with their name in any of their classes.
We are nickname people and each of the children goes by a diminutive of their formal name, none of which is the most common nickname of the name, like “Topher” for Christopher instead of the more common “Chris”, “Ned” for Edward, “Nell” for Helen.
My full name was mispronounced my entire life. I’ve gone by a nickname since age 8 because I couldn’t stand it.
As such, I wanted our D to have a name that would be easier to pronounce but still not typical. It also has a common nickname that is gender neutral. Family call her by the nickname but she’s gone by her full name since high school and uses it professionally. She says she likes her name so win for us ; )
I have an ethnic name that is uncommon even in its nation of origin. It’s a name that is pronounced differently than it is spelled in English, and it’s a variation on a more common version of the ethnic name in the home country, but with a key vowel sound changed.
So, to sum up, when I introduce myself to Americans, they helpfully point out that my name is not spelled as it should be (thanks!!) and when I introduce myself to people from the home country, they also tell me that my name is wrong and that it should actually be pronounced like the more common version.
I ended up marrying someone who is also half-half with the same home country and now my last name is a doozy too (my maiden name comes from my American dad, whose welsh last name is also an unusual variation on a more common spelling )
We gave our two daughters ethnic names but made sure that they are easy to pronounce in any language and that they are pronounced exactly as they are spelled.
I have to say my name has been a bit of a burden my whole life. I always laughed and demurred and never really insisted that people make the effort to get it right when I was younger, but I now regret my complacency. I also have zero anonymity as I am literally the only person in the USA and quite possibly the whole world with this particular combo of first and last name. I know one other person in the US with my same first name, but she is a family friend whose mom got the idea from my mom
My actual real name is a common nickname for a few names. I wish I had a nickel for everytime someone asked me what my real name was…and then didn’t believe me when I told them!
In high school, I actually had a teacher take points off of some graded thing because I used nickname which was not allowed😡. My parent had to intervene on that one.
We also chose names we thought were easy to pronounce, and spell correctly. Our DD can tall you…she likes her name, but it is pronounced and spelled wrong often.
H & I have very common, easy to spell, first names.
H - having taught PE for 32 years in poor elementary school - has seen everything and everything when it comes to names. Class after class, year after year, with very very few “common” names. When I would make the end of year certificates for H, I would have to type VERY slowly each name and triple check to make sure I got everything right.
When we named our kids, H got to pick the top 3. He didn’t want to have any negative association with the names with former students. We are also not cute nickname people, especially for boys. No Mikey, etc. Older S has a common first name, but not overly so. Younger S’ was one of the most common names at the time, but H had NEVER taught one. Both kids have common middle names that we thought sounded good together. Sort of funny, both names are similar or the same to some of my ancestors. Certain older relatives think they were named after them and were so happy. They were not, but we weren’t going to tell them otherwise.
My niece’s name is Charlotte. She was named after the city. The parents call her Charlie. My sister (grandma) fought against the nickname I initially, but gave in after a while. They are now pregnant with the second one, a boy. They live in Bermuda, so I wonder if they would name the boy Hamilton.
I have a not common name but it would be easily spelled and pronounced, except for a random silent Y in it (I’ve never met anyone else. My husband has a common name that was popular growing up but haven’t heard it used on a baby in years. Besides #1, the rest of our kids have common names, all family, and could blend in with the royal family. Three go by nicknames, my name doesn’t lend itself to a nickname, which I hated. My husband’s last name is multi syllable Italian, but shorter than my German maiden name, so no Italian first names. Oldest daughter was just flying and the gate agent asked if her mom was Irish, dad Italian, yep. My PSA, name your kids something that’s easy to pronounce, and don’t use unique spellings.
Kim is usually thought of as a girl’s name, but I’ve known two guys named Kim.
I knew a woman who married someone with a last name that is pronounced the same as her first name.
As far as common names, there was at least one girl named Jennifer in my class from kindergarten through college. In high school, I had a class with three Jennifers. They all wanted to be called Jenn. The teacher had fun with it by calling out Jenn and then pausing before saying the initial of the last name.
My daughter has always been mad that I didn’t have an acute accent over one of the e’s in her middle name. She like her middle name and continues to use it as her middle name instead of her maiden name, but wishes I had spelled it “correctly”
I have a first name that is more often a male’s spelling (I’m female), and in jr. high especially, was often placed in “shop” classes or other male dominated areas, and had to have that corrected.
There was a comic strip that was big in the 1930s with a character with my name, and older people (mostly men) used to often ask me dumb questions about it. That stopped after the 1980s when most folks no longer knew or heard of that character.
When my D was born, I put 5 of my favorite girls names together to create one lovely sounding unique name - it is, unfortunately, often mispronounced, but even more interesting is 12 years after she was born, the internet started becoming more used worldwide, and I located 2 other individuals that spelled their name as hers. One is a record producer in Sydney, Australia and the other was a young teenager from Vancouver, BC. I located the parents of the teen, and sent an e-mail. Turns out their D was named after a great aunt of the same name. We wrote back and forth a bit, and the girls started becoming pen pals. About 2 years after, just by chance, they were making a trip to the states, and would be staying 2 miles from us. We did get together, the kids hit it off and pics were taken. Unfortunately, once the other started hs, she no longer had an interest in doing pen pal stuff, and they lost touch. I didn’t push, it was a lovely and fun experience while it lasted.
I had two very good friends who started to use their middle names as their names in college. In both cases, it was years later that I found out their real first names…which were THE most common first names. In both cases, they just got tired of having the same first name as a bunch of others. Both had middle names that were great but not common names.
I have the same name as a notorious celebrity and it’s an unusual name. Thank goodness we spell it the same way, there is an alternate spelling.
It makes for interesting, although repetitive, conversation, I love it when people ask if I was named after her because a) she didn’t become famous until I was in my teens and b) my parents would be horrified!
I had a friend/coworker in my 20s named Yuri, her parents were Japanese and in Japan it’s a girl’s name. We went on a work retreat that had bunk houses and they put her with the men because Yuri is also a Russian boy’s name. It was a whole mess. They messed up things like her health insurance too because someone in corporate was just absolutely sure she was a guy.
I’ve always hated my full first name as it sounds pretentious to me, but only nuns and my mother when she was mad ever used it. I like the shortened version of it just fine, and I loved my grandmother’s play on it.
We gave our son a classic name that is hard to twist into anything kids would make fun of, but the shortened version combined with our last name makes him almost impossible to Google as both names are common everyday words. At boarding school, though, he kept having to say, “No, not THAT family” and, to others who thought it was spelled like a book/movie character, he got a lot of repetitive remarks that just got annoying after a while.
After re-reading my sob story above, I feel compelled to add that once people do learn my first name, I get many compliments on what a beautiful and unusual name it is
I do still wish I’d been more firm in my expectation that people make the effort to pronounce it correctly, it’s not hard to say and has no ‘difficult’ sounds in it.
(my maiden name comes from my American dad, whose welsh last name is also an unusual variation on a more common spelling 
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