Very interesting--even if you're not preggers. Shows the popularity and general conception of names across the ages and different countries.

This is a great book if you are looking for baby names! It's not just another list of names. It's much more - gives a little history of names, the popularity, names of similar styles. Highly recommend to expectant parents. It helped us picked Drew's name!

Favorite baby name book

This is the best baby name book I have ever seen. It is thorough without being overwhelming. The first section puts names in order alphabetically along with info about the origin, popularity, and suggestions for sibling names that match the style. The second section divides names according to styles such as "Antique Charm," "Timeless," and "Surfer Sixties."

In The Baby Name Wizard, Laura Wattenberg uses computer modelling, historical/social research and good old-fashioned critical thinking to analyze baby naming trends and sort names into ‘types’. Evelyn is ‘antique’; Finn is ‘brisk and breezy’; Hayden is ‘androgynous’.

Wattenberg’s advice on naming is thoughtful and perceptive; she doesn’t disparage any names, but she does give food for thought. For parents-to-be, the main draw is the ability to assess the popularity of your favoured name (whadaya mean, my rare name choice is actually a rising star?), and the ability to find names that are “sorta like X, but not so well-known”.

However, I don’t use this book as a parenting reference; I use it as a writing tool.

I was sorting through some old notebooks recently and I found in one of them pages and pages of names. I must have compiled this list of names when I was about 12. It’s not because I was baby-crazy or desperate to be on ‘16 and Pregnant’. I was just a budding writer with lots of characters to name.

Truth: writers spend way more time obsessing over baby names than expectant parents, because parents might have 2, 3, 4 kids, but writers ‘Christen’ dozens of babies every year. So don’t let the adorable baby on the cover put you off; this is an indispensible writing tool.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve started a new writing project, begun to sketch out my characters and then got stuck on finding a name. The problem isn’t solved by picking up a name dictionary and opening it on a random page. If my heroine is sharp and sarcastic, I can’t call her ‘Lucy’. This is the sort of situation where Wizard becomes indispensible. If you know you want a brisk, one-syllable name, just look up that ‘type’ and find a whole selection to choose from.

Wizard is also great for avoiding anachronisms, because it includes charts of each name’s rising/falling popularity. If your hero was born in 1980, he shouldn’t be called ‘Braeden’. That’s an obvious example, but a lot of names we assume were popular during a certain time period actually weren’t.

The ‘brother/sister’ suggestions that come with each name are also incredibly useful – although not necessarily for brothers and sisters. If you’re going to spend 100,000 words writing about best friends or lovers, it’s helpful that their names “go together”. Who wants to end up writing “Amethyst and Jack walked down the street… Amethyst and Jack went to the shops… Amethyst and Jack were in big trouble”?

You can access a lot of Wizard’s features (popularity charts, for example) from its accompanying website, but the book’s more in-depth and it’s a handy reference to have within easy reach when you’re writing.

Unlike any other baby name book you've seen. Goes beyond telling you what the name *means* to include an analysis of its popularity over time, its "sibling" names for both genders (i.e., if your brother is named Jason, you're likely to be named...."), its cultural context, and a forecast of its future popularity. Fascinating, helpful if you're pregnant, and a fun coffee table addition. No one can resist picking it up.

If you want to play with the interactive website, go to:
http://www.babynamewizard.com/namevoy...

This was the best baby name book I found (and I read about 10). Rather than focusing on the derivation of names and listing an enormous quantity, this book helps you figure out the frequency of usage -- historically -- of a well-edited list of names, as well as their common associations. I also found the book's scheme for classifying categories of names to be helpful.

Although it bears some similarities to Bring Back Beatrice, Laura Wattenberg’s naming volume, The Baby Name Wizard: A Magical Method for Finding the Perfect Name for Your Baby draws on more of an algorithmic approach to finding names you like. Of course, there is nothing magical about algorithms, they are mathematical formulae, but we’ll assume that the author was overruled by her editor when it came to the subtitle.

In a process similar to how Pandora decides what songs you might like based on your general music preferences, The Baby Name Wizard divides names into categories and subcategories, so that you can find names in the categories to which you are most drawn. Most of the names we like fall into the “antique,” “ladies and gentlemen,” “Biblical,” and “timeless” categories. In addition to style, each name is shown with it’s popularity rank, a graph of historical usage, lists of brother and sister names that would match, and a short paragraph about name, origin, meaning, or other considerations.

{Read my full review here}

Love the popularity stats, brother/sister trends, and the styles index at the back.... HUGE missing information: Origin/History and meanings.
Only a few names had that listed.
I personally would be more interested in the origin and meaning of my possible child’s name then what baseball or movie star currently has it; Couldn’t care less about that.
So I have to go online to now look up the ethnic/ historical origin and meanings of several names that I liked from this book. Seems like a huge flaw to me...

This is the best baby name book I've ever come across, not that I found my children's names in here (in fact, I've never seen either of my children's names in ANY baby name book). BUT it's a very effective system given that for today's parents, the popularity of a name is often just as much a consideration as its meaning or origin. Each main entry name is accompanied by a graph charting that name's popularity since it's emergence. Very useful. The other very effective feature is the fact that the names have been categorised into thematic groups, so if you like the sounds of "Zoe" but you wouldn't quite want to call your child that, you just go to the categories that include Zoe and you find many other names that you are very likely to like. It's surprising, but it's actually very accurate. The only disadvantage to this book is it's very American (which I suppose is not a disadvantage if you're American). So it might list a name of French origin as being very uncommon, when in fact it's currently as common as John or Mary in France. I suppose there had to be a limitation somewhere.

I've skimmed dozens of name books and this one is my favorite!

It shows statistical trends for various names over time. It gives recommendations: "if you like this name, here are others you might like." It gives honest, candid descriptions of names and Wattenberg has a great sense of humor. What other book is going to be so brutally honest as to tell you that a particular name is "the twirpiest name in America?"

Thankfully...this description helped setttle the debate with my husband who wanted us to use the "twirpiest" name just because it was his grandpa's name. Seriously...family names are great, but no kid should get stuck with a name that's going to make everybody laugh at him!

This book analyzes trends in baby names to offer suggestions based on names you already like. It looks at the top five girl and boy sibling names for 1,500 popular girl and boy names. The idea is that if you like a certain name, chances are good that you will also like the popular sibling names like other parents have. We ultimately didn't use it for our child's name, but we liked looking through it and found it much less overwhelming than most of the other baby name books out there.