Relationships

This may be the strangest baby name ever – and that’s saying something

Jul 09, 2018

Unusual and truly bizarre names are becoming far more common nowadays.

Think you’ve heard it all when it comes to unusual baby names? Think again, because one mum has been left baffled after her friend chose the “the strangest baby name ever”.

In a world of bizarre baby names like Apple, Saint or Fish and Chips (yep, seriously, a parent named their child after their favourite takeaway, it seems), it takes something really, err, special to surprise most people these days. But Netmums user, Annalise D, may have found the strangest yet.

Posting on the popular online forum, she said her friend had decided on the name “Abcde” for her newborn baby. “The baby’s name is spelt: Abcde,” she wrote. “And pronounced: Ab-si-dee. I’ve never heard of this name before – has anyone else? Or any other crazy names you’ve heard of?”

Fellow readers were equally bemused, with many calling it “absolutely ghastly” and “truly awful”. “It should be illegal to saddle children with names like that,” one commentator wrote. Another added, “That is the silliest name I’ve ever heard – but kudos for the imaginative pronunciation. Some parents are too cruel”.

“If this isn’t a joke…then that’s truly awful. Fancy saddling a child with that kind of ridiculous name. Imagine growing up to constant questions accompanied by smirking about his name?!” a third wrote.

While it’s the first time we’ve heard of this name, the woman pointed out that it’s not completely unheard of, and shared a Wikipedia article which stated that “328 girls were named Abcde in the United States between 1990 and 2014”.

Whatever happened to traditional names like Charlotte, George or Emma? Unusual and truly bizarre names are becoming far more common nowadays. Over the past few years, authorities have even had to intervene, with parents hoping to use names such as Nutella, Facebook, Cyanide and Anus having been told they aren’t permitted to register them.

It’s all good and well to have a unique name, but as professor Helen Petrie from the University of York told Huffington Post UK that she’d “found that people with unusual names had a really hard time, particularly when they were children”.