Favourite names

Bea is a former old lady name that's cute again as a short form -- and is now beginning to stand on its own. Bee is a variation that, like Bea, can work as a diminutive for any name that starts with the letter B, or in the middle. Bea actually stood alone on the popularity lists for four years at the beginning of the twentieth century--and it could happen again.

A sweet name with many cross-cultural ties: it's an equivalent of Jane in languages including Czech, Slovak, Dutch, German, Slovene, Catalan, Estonian, and Latvian.

Lavender lags far behind sweet-smelling purple-hued sister names Violet and Lila, but is starting to get some enthusiastic attention from cutting-edge namers along with other adventurous nature names like Clementine and Marigold.

Luella is a sleeker spelling variant of the girls' name Louella and is now more popular than the original. Sweet, but lively, it was a popular name in the the early 19th century, but fell out of favor in the 50s. Now, after a 60 year absence, it's back in the charts, in the US and the UK.

Oliver is an international star, ranking near the top of the charts in the US and throughout the English-speaking world, along with a host of European and Latin American countries, from Norway to Chile, Slovenia to Switzerland.

One of the rarest of the floral names, though not without some teasing potential. Peony is a historical 1948 novel by Pearl S. Buck.

Upbeat nickname-name that can't help but make you smile. You might want to use it as a short form for a more "serious" name such as Sunniva, but Sunny is undeniably, well, sunny.