We're just eight days into he new year and the nice people at Births, Deaths and Marriages Victoria have already released the complete list of baby names used in the state of Victoria in 2012.
For those of you not familiar with Australia, Victoria is a small state in the South East of Australia. It's capital city is Melbourne (where I live!) and the state population as of March 2012 was 5,603,100.
The list of names from 2012 doesn't actually reach 1000 names, due to our smaller population. Instead we had 697 girl names and 650 boys names on the charts, which only counted names given to more than 5 children. So I thought I'd have a quick recap of the top, middle and rarest names from 2012 for Victoria.
Our top 10 favourite names for 2012 were:
Olivia Jack
Ruby William
Mia Oliver
Emily Ethan
Amelia Thomas
Sophie Noah
Ava James
Zoe Lucas
Isabella Joshua
Sienna Alexander
Past the top 10, I thought I'd look at names that were "middle of the field" - that is, given to approximately half as many children as the top name was. Surprisingly, these names were not positioned at 100, 200 or 300 out of 600 or so. For the girls, Grace was "middle of the field", yet she is only position #13! Out of 697! It's a similar story with the boys, with "middle of the field" names Harry and Henry positioned at #22 and #23 out of 650.
Our pre-occupation with choosing "different" and "special" names for our children means that the field is much more spread out, and our choices more diverse. For both boys and girls, about a third of the names on the list were given to just 6-10 children. A selection of some of the interesting names that fall into this category include:
Aditi Hector
Alkali Jovan
Amina Koda
Eadie Lucian
Inara Maxim
Mahlia Novak
Portia Oakley
Samira Odin
Tayah Tarkyn
Zahlee Willem
Almost just as fun was looking for the names that weren't listed. And I must admit a small sense of joy at the fact that some of my secret (and not so secret) top picks weren't there.
