"The intrinsic purpose of a name is to distinguish people from others," says Barry. "But in previous years, people wanted to avoid a name that was too unusual. They wanted a name that would be popular, wouldn't be ridiculed."
Today, however, parents don't want their little Ashley to be the 22nd Ashley in kindergarten. So they're scouring the Internet to find the most popular names and working hard to avoid them.
What they're coming up with is definitely uncommon.
Take the 29 babies named Skyy, for instance. Although Sky has been popular since the 1960s, the spelling of Skyy gave away its origin - Skyy vodka.
"One of the names that surprised me was the number of Evians, the bottled water," says Evans. "There were 10 boys named Evian and 15 girls. That was one I hadn't quite thought of before."
Nautica was no surprise to Evans, who'd seen that one gaining ground. But the name has become almost exclusively female. Armani, by contrast, still seems to be a unisex name -- perhaps the Dana of its time. In 2000, he found 273 boys named Armani and 298 girls.
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