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The story
Initials of a name
Popularity of a name
Other sites for baby namesThe story behind our twins' names
(note: this page uses Big5 character encoding for the Chinese characters. You can go to the View menu, pull down Encoding and select "Traditional Chinese (Big5)", then the text display will correct itself in the next redraw. Otherwise, if you see one or two unreadable text characters enclosed in parenthesis(), it simply means your browser is not set up to read Big5 characters. Also please kindly ignore the ugly font style because Chinese text uses a fixed width font and your browser probably substituted it with the courier font.)There is a long story behind our twins' names. When we thought about their names, we tried to make sure they have different initials, that way their identities will be less likely to get confused. We initially thought about Josephine (named after my other name Joseph) and Alexandria (named after my wife's name Sandy.)
Then my wife's dad came up with several Chinese names for the girls. We only like one of his suggestions. So we started with "Gze Un" (����) literally meaning purple & gratitude, then we found a English name Joanne, which sounds close to that. It is a Chinese tradition to name the kids sharing one Chinese character, so we needed to find another name "Gze (��) something" or "something Un (��)" and at the same time we want a English name that sounds like it. My wife likes Jasmine in the Disney's Aladdin movie (DVD|VHS), and we decided the Chinese name "Gze Min" (����) to go with that. It literally means purple & quick/alert.
Since we've decided on two names that were not based on ours, we wanted their middle names to be named after us. My Chinese name (���P) literally means "the second giant bird", so we named the first child Lynette, which means a small bird in Old French. (Lynette also means a pool of clear water in English). My wife's Chinese name (����) literally means "Cloud & Jade", so we named the second child Jade. In gemology terms, Jade comes in two varieties: Jadeite, originally found in Guatemala and carved by early Indian civilizations, and nephrite, most famously carved by the Chinese. In etymology terms, the word Jade originated from the Spanish piedra de la ijada, literally loin stone, ultimately from Latin ilia (flanks) from the belief that jade cures renal colic. It was the name given for the jadeite carved by Indian civilizations of Central America. Though Jade the mineral was found in ancient civilizations, however, "JADE" the word could be traced to the year 1657 when the Spanish discovered the Indian stone carvings in America.
Joanne is not as popular a name as Jasmine is among baby girls in the US. Joanne ranked 517th, beyond 1000, 837th, 965th and 941st respectively from year 1996 to 2000 in the baby names popularity list. Jasmine, on the other hand, ranked 30th, 31st, 26th, 26th and 28th respectively from year 1996 to 2000 in the same list. Lynette never made it to the top 1000 lists. It ranked around 1246th in year 1996. Jade ranked 145th, 108th, 129th, 118th and 118th respectively from year 1996 to 2000.
Our family name Lai (��), when written in Chinese, the character is composed of several radicals. It includes the symbols of "rice stalk (��)", "sickle (�M)", "man (�H)" on top of "water (��)". The character is used often in phrases that mean "dawn (����)" and "common people (����)". Dawn is the time when rice farmers go to work. Rice farmers are the common people. Though I don't know for sure what my ancestors did for living, rice farming won't be too far off. The name is also the name of a minority tribe, which lives on the HaiNan Island off the South coast of China. My ancestor might have emigrated from that island hundreds of years ago. The character translates into Lai(4) from Cantonese, but translates into Li(2) from Mandarin. According to another website, my surname (listed as Li2) means black or dark, but I believe Rice Farmer is more appropriate.
LAI is ranked 3686th, (or 2084th as LI) in the last name frequency list from the 1990 Census by the US Census Bureau. It ranks 47th among Chinese-like surnames in the US. Don't bother guessing, Smith is number one family name in the US. I heard on the news couple years back, �� Wang (or Wong in Cantonese) is the most popular surname in the mainland China. My name Lai (��) is ranked 83rd in another list, (see the 3rd character in the 2nd row) it translates to Li2 in the mainland spelling system. The same ranking can also be found on this Chinese site, see the 3rd characters on the 9th row. Unlike the previous list, this one is presented in traditional Chinese Characters.
In summary, the twins' first names were chosen phonetically, without consideration of their meanings, to match their Chinese names picked by grandpa. And the middle names were chosen by the meanings to match those of our Chinese names. Consequently, their names came from a multi-cultural origin.
Israel (Hebrew) and Iran (Persian) are not friendly neighbors. I just hope Joanne and Jasmine will not fight because of their names' origin. :-)
- Joanne Lynette Lai is Hebrew, Old French and Chinese in origin
- Jasmine Jade Lai is Persian, Spanish and Chinese in origin
Though we didn't do that on purpose, we later found that the twins initials are JLL and JJL. If the initials are written in some fancy font style, their initials looks like this wagging tail.
Initials of a name
To pick a good name, you need to consider various aspects of the name such as
Many people forget to check the initials when the first, middle and last name are put together. One article in the Parent's Magazine (Aug 1998) stated that a statistic study which analyzed some death records showed that people whose initials have negative meaning (such as P.I.G., B.A.D., B.U.M., D.I.E. etc.) die younger than the control group whose initials are meaningless. On the contrary, people with positive initials (such as J.O.Y., F.U.N., W.I.T. etc.) live longer than the control group. Moreover, people with negative initials are more likely to die of suicide and accident. It is understandable because a bad name is a life time burden to a person's mental health. Keep that in mind when choosing a name for your child.
- sound
- uniqueness
- popularity
- associations
- meaning
- origin
- nicknames
- spelling and Pronunciation
- initials
- gender identification
- family and friends etc.
Popularity of a name
Michael Shackleford ranked boys and girls name based on data from the Social Security Number Applications.
(note for non-US readers: All babies born in the US need to apply for a Social Security Number before their parents can claim them as dependents for tax purpose. Hence the Social Security Administration became an excellent and accurate source for new babies' names statistics.)Two of his lists here
Names of Boys born in 1997are based on partial 1997 data (a 1% sample from January to August.) These two lists are ranked after grouping spelling variations of the same name together. See his original 1997 report at the Social Security Administration web site. You will find in his official report the ungrouped 1997 lists along with much much more statistical data (date back to the year 1880). The grouped and ungrouped rankings are quite different. They represent two different aspects of name popularity. Don't forget to also check out his update in other years using 100% full year sample.
Names of Girls born in 1997Same Michael Shackleford's lists appear in other baby sites, but these lists are severely stripped down.
BabyCenter.com
BabyNames.com
Other Shackleford's lists also appear in
The New Baby Name IndexThe Shackleford's lists reflect the latest trends on new baby names in the US, i.e. they exclude "out-of-fashion" names of the older folks. In fact, Michael observed some major changes in the trend over the past few decades. For example, the name Michael was number 51 in 1930, number 16 in 1940 and became number 1 for three decades since 1970. The name Mary went from number 1 in 1960 to number 41 in 1990. The name Betty went from number 2 in 1930 to number 1349 in 1990. So you would find many Marys and Bettys among the older generation, but many Emilys and Jennifers among kids and teenagers.
If you are more interested in the name popularity in the overall US population, check out the U.S. Census Bureau's name frequency studies from the 1990 Census. Yet in another source, see the Research on first name frequency and fashions and other name research conducted by Cleveland Kent Evans, Ph.D. He used a sample from 13 States. I wonder if there might be regional bias in his sample, since names selection depend very much on cultural composition of regional population.
The list of lists
In summary, the lists I mentioned are as follows:
- Trends of baby names over the decades (observed by Michael Shackleford)
- Name distributions reports by SSA
- Top baby names of 1997 that started these annual list by SSA
- Top baby names in any given year by SSA
- Names of Boys born in 1997 (grouped by Michael Shackleford)
- Names of Girls born in 1997 (grouped by Michael Shackleford)
- Top names in 1990 Census by U.S. Census Bureau
- Top names in 2000 Census by U.S. Census Bureau (still in planning stage)
Other baby name sites:
Eponym (a resourceful site about names in general)
The New Baby Name Index
Irish Names
BabyNamer
ParentTime
Meaning of baby names
BabyZoneOn the lighter side ...
What's in a Name? (get a story on a random name each time you reload this page)
Name of Typhoon
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