UK Baby Names

Related to the word bourgeois; actor Burgess Meredith put this surname in first place.

Dancer feels like a name ready to leap into the charts with its sense of life and joy; and if names like Hunter and Archer can be used, why not Dancer. There will be some danger of other kids relating this one to Santa's reindeer and it might make a good name for a Christmas baby, but that might be a positive connotation for a child.

A city and river in Scotland; this is upbeat and cheery, but doesn't seem that appropriate as a name.

One of the best of this fashionable occupational group, strong and particularly well suited to a girl, also with alluring connection to glamour girl Ava Gardner.

Affrica has long been a popular name on the Isle of Man, where long ago there was a Princess named Affrica.

A name you would probably want to use only if it's in your family history. The first syllable moves it miles away from the softer Whitney.

Randall Jarrell was an important mid-20th century poet; his surname makes a pleasingly soft name for a girl.

Cheever has a nice, cheery sound, literary ties to novelist and short writer John Cheever and also, sideways, to the Edward Arlington Robinson narrative poem "Miniver Cheevy," as well as a subliminal association with the desirable word achiever: all strong pluses.

To honor an ancestral Peter.

This feminine diminutive of John from the Isle of Man is also sometimes used as a variant of Judith. Still, we think it is as attractive as Thomasina or Jacoba -- that is, not very.

Surname doomed to remain a surname.

Fresh way to pass down Roger.

Gentle and southern-inflected, redolent of the North Carolina landscape.