The Complete Idiot's Guide to 30,000 Baby Names

by Robbi Hess and Marcia Layton Turner

The Complete Idiot s Guide to 30,000 Baby Names offers a little something extra than the majority of books on the market. Rather than provide readers with an alphabetized name list for each gender... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1592574556
• ISBN13: 9781592574551
• Release Date: February 2006
• Publisher: Alpha Books
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.4" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Sanity on Names; etymology meaning

One the the best all round collection of first names going round. Apon research of the etymology of first names, this would have to be one of the most accurate and rewarding books to come across when thinking for your newborn...or even for your own personal education. Many congratulations for Marcia, for puting this together.

30,000 Baby names

This is a neat book. It has lists of names- everything from movie stars to nobel prize winners, in addition to the compilation of name suggestions.

Wonderful resource for writers, roleplayers, and of course, parents-to-be!

This is a very focussed book, containing baby names and nothing but baby names. If that's what you're looking for, you've seriously come to the right place. It has a couple of aspects to it that I really love and that put it head and shoulders above the other naming books I've looked at. For one, it doesn't just take names from cultures--it has lists of names of celebrities, sports heroes, award-winners of various types, and so on. It provides a much wider array of lists to keep you interested and give you something to think about when naming your child. You could name your child after a Nobel Prize winner, an Olympic gymnast, the CEO of a famous company, an opera singer, an activist, or a mythological figure. The one negative here is that some of these lists seem rather short and arbitrary (lists of actors and actresses, for example, seem to pick a rather arbitrary small subset of the possibilities), however, simply by pointing out the types of names you might look at the book gives you a place to start looking for more if you don't quite like the specific options it presents. I like the fact that last names are included in some of these lists, which isn't the case with any other baby name resource I've found. You can use these last names as middle names, or, if you're a writer or roleplayer looking for inspiration, you can mix-and-match first and last names that you like. All in all I think this is the most fun, interesting, and useful naming book I've seen so far. However, it does have a couple of problems. In one section the book promises to include a list of "no-nos"--names you should avoid giving your child--yet I couldn't find this section at all. Some of the sources get pretty silly, such as superhero secret identity names and brand names--I just can't imagine naming my kid after yogurt, thanks. And a few suggestions would get your child into so many fights at school that I can't even believe the authors included them (Uranus as a boy's name, anyone? *Shudder*). Exercise a little restraint and maybe run your ideas past your neighbor's 10-year-old to make sure he doesn't start laughing too quickly or find an obvious crude joke in the name.