Sunday Summary: Jake, Gray, Maud, and Ooh … New Zealand!

Happy Sunday!

Have you seen Solo? It didn’t get great reviews, but we watched it this weekend. And I loved it! Alden Ehrenreich made a great young Han. My husband is a big Star Wars fan, so he got all of the inside references. I didn’t … but the movie held up well on its own. But I mention it here because I love the story about how Han got his name.

Elsewhere online:

• All those boys named Jacob in the late 1990s and early 2000s are now in college, which means lots of football players answering to Jake. Will this happen in another twenty years with Liam or Noah?
• Color names fascinate me, including paint colors. Benjamin Moore just released their color of the year for 2019. It’s a shade of gray known as Metropolitan. All of these Gray names keep trending – is the name the next big thing, too? Grayson, almost unknown before the 1980s, has climbed every year since 2001. It now stands at #34, not counting alternate spellings. That’s pretty impressive. More names inspired by the color set: Ivory, Fern, Beau, and Hale.
• Hands down, Maud Elizabeth Daphne Marina Windsor is my favorite of the royal bridesmaid names of recent years. British Baby Names has the whole list here.
• Tycho’s sister is … Zora Valentina! What a gorgeous sibset.
• Will Gladys make a comeback? It sounds mad, but then again, we thought the same thing about Hazel not so long ago …
• An interesting conversation about choosing a botanical/flower name with a few twists from Duana. And I agree: would you avoid Daphne just because of Scooby Doo?
• Are the parents of New Zealand the best namers in the English-speaking world? Maybe so …

In other news, we are currently working our way through the Great Halloween Baby Names contest, Harry Potter edition.

• Vote for your favorite Wizard names here.
• And the Witches round is here.

That’s all for this week! As always, thank you for reading – and have a great week.