I recently read an article about baby names caught my eye: 22 baby Naming rules worth Following.
The “rules” were submitted by parents who were surveyed, and most make sense to me. See: No yooneek spellings. name your son (or daughter) Peyton or even Payton. but not Peighton, Patyn, or Paitynne.
Rule #3 is the one I broke when we chose the names Julian and Scarlett just because we liked them: A first name should ideally embody some kind of meaning. That might be family or ethnic significance, literal meaning, or even that you’ve loved it since you were seven. A name with meaning is going to have more staying power than one you choose simply because it’s attractive.
Here’s another good one: Don’t let anyone pressure you into or out of a name. It’s the Number 1 reason behind baby name regret.
And this one I may have followed subconsciously, but I never actually did the math: Ideally, first, middle, and last names will be unequal numbers of syllables. So 3-1-2 tends to work better than 2-2-2. (My son is 3-1-3 and my daughter is 2-1-3, while I am 2-4-1. I think those of you who have one-syllable last name probably were more aware of this.)