Man, sometimes you just trip over a great idea when you’re trying to avoid doing actual work. That’s exactly how this list came together, honestly. I wasn’t planning on writing a baby name post, but life just decided to throw me into the deep end of newborn anxiety.
My buddy, we’ll call her Sarah, she was due in about three weeks, right? And she was freaking out. Absolutely paralyzed by choice. She kept texting me pictures of elaborate name lists she had printed out—like, three pages of names that sounded like they belonged to European royalty or something complicated. She needed short, sweet, simple names. Names you don’t have to spell out four times at Starbucks. Names that fit a cute little girl but also work when she’s 40 and running a company. All the good, easy ones felt taken, or so she thought.
I told her, “Stop panicking. I got this.” I volunteered to curate a perfect, limited list for her. Why? Because I know how choice paralysis works. Give a panicked person twenty names, and they fail. Give them eight perfect names, and they can actually make a decision. But before I could start any research, I had to define the parameters. You can’t search for ‘cute short name’ and expect results. That’s like asking Google for ‘good movie.’
Establishing the Strict Filter Rules
I sat down at my kitchen table, poured a coffee, and wrote out the constraints. The process had to be brutal, or the list would sprawl again.
- Rule One: Must be English/Anglo-Saxon Origin. No trying to be fancy with foreign accents or spellings. Had to sound immediately recognizable in the US/UK.
- Rule Two: Extreme Brevity. One or two syllables, max. Three letters minimum, five letters maximum. Period. I was looking for efficiency. Six letters felt too long.
- Rule Three: Had to Pass the ‘Spelling Test.’ If you had to clarify if it had an ‘i’ or a ‘y,’ or if it required a hyphen, it was immediately tossed out. Easy to pronounce, hard to mess up.
- Rule Four: Timeless, Not Trendy. If it rocketed into the top 10 list last year, I skipped it, because those names age fast and become tied to a specific decade. I wanted classics that never go out of style.
The Grinding Process: Sifting Through the Databases
Once the rules were hard-coded into my brain, I started where everyone starts: online databases. I pulled up Nameberry and Baby Names dot com. I set the initial filters for ‘Female’ and then I just started scrolling endlessly. This wasn’t quick; I spent a solid two and a half hours one afternoon just dumping possibilities into a giant Google Sheet. I wasn’t judging yet; I was just collecting anything that looked plausible. I must have started with maybe 300 names. Absolute chaos.
Then came the hard part: the brutal elimination process. I printed the list out—yes, I printed it, I needed a physical copy—and literally just took a red pen to it. This is where the rules earned their keep.
First, I knocked out anything that sounded too much like a nickname—like ‘Bea’ or ‘Vi.’ Those are cute, but they aren’t full names for the birth certificate. Then I ran checks on the letter count. If it had six letters, like ‘Audrey’ or ‘Willow’ (which I love, but they failed the rule), they were gone. I crossed off maybe 150 names instantly just using the letter-count rule. It was liberating.
I was left with about 45 solid options. Still too many for a stressed mom-to-be. So I moved onto the subjective filters. I started vetting the meaning and vibe. I searched up every single definition. If the historical meaning was something depressing or obscure, like “dweller by the murky pool,” I chucked it. I needed gentle, positive, simple meanings. Names associated with nature, light, or simple virtues got to stay. This step pruned the list down to about twenty finalists.
The Final Selection and Justification
I had to fight myself to get to eight. Eight is a nice, manageable number. It gives variety without causing decision fatigue. I wrestled between ‘June’ and ‘Jade,’ and finally kept both because they had such distinctively different vibes—one being super classic, the other slightly sparky. I considered ‘Nell’ but decided it felt too restrictive compared to the others, so I replaced it with ‘Gia’ because it was short and had a strong vowel sound.
The last step was polishing the list for presentation. I arranged them alphabetically and then added a tiny justification for each one—just a quick note on why it made the cut based on the rules. I didn’t just want names; I wanted curated, vetted, simple suggestions.
I packaged up the email with the final eight and hit send to Sarah with the subject line, “Pick one and stop worrying.” She called me back five minutes later just shouting and laughing. She said she was immediately leaning toward one of the simple four-letter options, finally feeling relieved.
That whole exercise was a serious time sink, but it felt good to solve a real-world, high-stakes problem for my friend. I figured if she was drowning in complicated names, lots of other people were too. So I took the eight finalists, copied the notes I had made for Sarah, wrote this introduction explaining the painful elimination process, and posted the whole thing up. I’m hoping it saves some other new parent the hours I spent scrolling and crossing things off a piece of paper. Sometimes the best content comes from solving a simple problem you didn’t even know you had until someone else drags you into their beautiful mess.