The Art of Naming

The baby name Dagny is our featured name, taken from our list of names ending with the letters "-ny". Dagny is an Old Norse name for females. It comes from Dagný, which was derived from the elements dagr meaning "day" and ný meaning "new". If you ask me, "new day" is an adorable meaning, and it would be especially sentimental on a rainbow baby. It is often used in Scandinavian countries, including Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark.  Another form includes the Latvian Dagnija. This name first appeared on record in the US in 1893. It has never had significant popularity and it has never been commonly used. If you're looking for a truly rare name, Dagny is a safe bet.  The most births in a single year that were earned by Dagny is 80 in 2013, which is its highest popularity peak on record. There were only 37 girls named Dagny in 2016. This name has never ranked within the Top 1000 in the US. It did rank in Iceland in 2007 at #75. It

Taken from the list of The Very Best S Names for Boys and Girls is the interesting masculine name Soren. Let's learn more about it. Soren is a Scandinavian name that's starting to catch on with American parents today. There are three different ways to spell Soren . First, there's just the anglicized Soren which is typically pronounced Sorr-en. If you venture into Scandinavia, there's also the Danish and Norwegian form the name spelled Søren and pronounced more like SUU-ren. Derived from that is the form that the Swedes and Germans tend to prefer: Sören , also pronounced SUU-ren or ZUU-ren. No matter how it is accented, the name originally comes from Severinus which is a Roman family name derived from Severus meaning "stern" in Latin. This name has been well-used in Denmark. Just take a look at the long list of mostly Danish famous people on Nameberry.   What about its popularity in America? Soren first appeared on record in the US in 1912 but it

Along with dozens of other names , Elsa comes from the name Elizabeth .  Of course, Elizabeth comes from the Greek form of the Hebrew name Elisheva. It means either "my God is an oath", "my God is abundance" or "pledged to God". Elizabeth has been extremely consistent in its popularity over the years, having always been in the Top 30 since 1880. The lovely German Elsa is also very consistent in its popularity since 1880 in the US. Since the release of the wildly successful movie Disney's Frozen in November 2013 featuring a Queen Elsa, the baby name Elsa is expected to leap up the charts in 2014.  Before Frozen, Elsa originally gained popularity as a name among English speakers because of Wagner's romantic opera Lohengrin in 1848. Elsa was the name of the heroine in the opera. I chose to feature Elsa as part of Scandinavian week because, while it is mostly used in Germany, it also has usage in the Scandinavian countries, particularly Sw

This edition of World-Wide Wednesday focuses on the baby names of Scandinavia. This includes the three kingdoms of Norway, Denmark and Sweden. These three countries are also categorized as Nordic countries along with Finland, Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe islands. There is plenty of overlapping influence between the countries that sometimes is translated into their baby names. Most baby name sites group all of these together as one overall "origin" called Scandinavian names. In general, surnames, or "heritable family names", weren't used often in Scandinavia until rather recently in comparison with some other countries. In Denmark, an act was passed in 1526 that made families of nobility have to begin using a heritable name. High class people followed suit during the next few centuries and finally everyone else did later. They followed a patronymic naming tradition that gave the father's name to the children with the suffix "-sen" added to t

Welcome to Scandinavian Week! You may have seen the polls that I made on the sidebar of the blog and maybe you even voted for your favorite Scandinavian names for each gender. After a tie-breaker, the winning male name was Magnus. Magnus is a Late Latin name meaning "Great" but it is heavily used by Scandinavians, particularly those from Sweden, Norway and Denmark.  It became popular in those countries because of the 11th century King Magnus I of Norway. It was said that King Magnus I may have been named after another ruler, Charlemagne, who was also known as Carolus Magnus, or Charles the Great.  Others who bore the name Magnus include a 7th century saint, 6 more kings of Norway, and 3 kings of Sweden. In the middle ages, the name Magnus gained usage in Scotland and Ireland. Manus is an Irish variant of the name. There's also the Finnish variants Manu, Mauno and Maunu, and the Danish Mogens. Interestingly, from Magnus sprang forth the Medieval English name M