Adjective Names

New is a middle name name with meaning: Your baby, after all, is new to the world and you may hope will continue to approach life and experience as if everything is new and exciting.

Wise is a lovely virtue to bestow upon a baby, as seen through the increasingly popular unisex choice Sage. Wise would make for a perfect middle name with the one-syllable flow.

Hallow is a word meaning sacred or holy. As the root word for Halloween (orginally All Hallows' Eve), this name might be an evocative choice for a baby born on or near October 31st. It could work well for either a boy or a girl and offers the nicknames Hal and Halley.

A very small number of boys are given this intense and aggressive name each year.

As Ireland becomes fashionable as a place name, bouncing on and off of the US girls charts thanks to Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin choosing it for their daughter, some parents may start to consider the adjective form Irish for either a boy or girl.

Childish Gambino is the musical alter-ego of writer/producer Donald Glover, creator of the television show Atlanta. Glover got the name Childish Gambino from an online name generator.

Literature and poetry lovers might use Epic as a word name — an epic is a long narrative poem, typically the story of a hero. But epic has taken on a contemporary meaning of "impressive," which makes it somewhat of a virtue name as well.

In the Plymouth Colony of the seventeenth century, Thankful was the third most popular of the abstract word names. It disappeared after 1700 and has virtually no chance of returning.

Though rarely heard now, Coy has been around for a century and was not an uncommon name for boys a hundred years ago. There have been a couple of NFL players named Coy, Coy Bowles is in the Zac Brown band, and of course there was Coy Duke in The Dukes of Hazzard. Due to the flirty connotations of the word "coy", McCoy is a more popular and recommended choice today.

Smart choice given to a handful of baby boys each year.

Genuine is a truly (or dare we say genuinely) unique virtue name. It definitely makes a statement, but could easily lend itself to the familiar nicknames Gen/Jen or Genny/Jenny.

This light and cheerful word name conjured up imagery of breezy days at the beach, kids flying kites, or wind blowing through the trees — all lovely associations to have.

A brilliant choice, but one that has more potential for baby girls.

A modern virtue name, particularly desirable in this pressure-cooker world.

Adjectives names are the latest class of word names to gain popularity in the US, a trend spurred by celebrities. Beautiful is one of the more established adjective names — first used in 1997 — yet has never been given to more than 70 baby girls in a single year.

Honor and Honesty are on the ascent, and now Honest has been introduced into the name pool. Maybe Honestly will be next.

A new aspirational name with two shining meanings.

Does it really work as a name? Enough parents thought so to put it in the Top 700 in one recent year.