Oxford English Dictionary of First Names
Friday July 10, 2009
There are tons of free sources for baby names available on the web, but none, quite like the Oxford English Dictionary of First Names. Besides being a trusted authority, I really like the way they word their answers to searches. Here's my names, for example:
"Originally a pet form of Robert, from the short form Rob + the diminutive suffix -in (of Old French origin), but now nearly always used as an independent name. In recent years it has been increasingly used as a girl's name, partly under the influence of the vocabulary word denoting the bird."Perhaps I just like the stuffy feel to the sentence structure, like you can see some older gentleman in a tweed jacket churning out the text on the other end of the computer. If you're looking for another site, I really like NameBerry from the creators of Beyond Ava and Aiden. What are your thoughts and your favorite baby naming resources on or offline, just hit the comments section and let me know!
Related:
My husband and I always liked old-fashioned names. When we traveled to Charleston, S.C. while I was pregnant, we toured through one of the old cemeteries and found a lot of inspiration on the tombstones.