Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #858854 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 300 pages

Synopsis
A directory of 50,000 baby name choices from around the world. The names are listed alphabetically by origin, for example American, Arabic, Basque, Cherokee, Chinese, Czech, Danish, English, and so on. The book contains: the index listing of names by country or ethnicity of origin; the most popular names from the 1880s through to the 1990s; advice on how to make up a new name; a list of things to consider when choosing a name; a special listing of gender-neutral names; the 100 most popular names of the year; the 25 most popular black names of the year; and information on birth stones and birth flowers.

Customer Reviews

Sketchy and Disappointing
Frankly, I expected better. Based on the title ("Baby Names Around the World!") I expected ... well, I expected a well-researched and well-thought out analysis of baby names around the world.

Instead, it's like the author looked at the newspaper in a few dozen countries, picked out a bunch of random names from the articles and called it a baby name book. We even looked at some stats from here in Holland of the top 20 Most Popular names of the past year, and not ONE of the names was in the "Dutch Names" section of this book; conversely, not ONE of the names in this book was on the real-world list. Similar results appear when you compare this book with the Most Popular name lists from the U.S. and U.K.

It's not so much that the names he includes are "weird" ... just inaccurate. Plus the number of names in the book ("Over 50,000!") is padded by listing separately many variations of same name (e.g. John, Jon, Jonathon, Jonathan, etc.), which better and more complete books group together to show their common roots.

Truthfully, we did a lot better finding decent (and realistic) lists of international baby names on some of the very good web sites on the subject than from this book.

??? around the world ???
I have to say that I was tempted into purchasing this book by its title, suggestiong that I would find an international cross-section of names and their meanings.
Lansky provides many names (as do many other books on the same topic), but are they truely international? It seems that he has taken a few dictionaries and plucked a few words from each of these which he is now selling to us as a name of the country that speaks the respective language! I cannot prove this in most languages as I am not one of those languistic miracles (wouldn't need a book like that then..), but as German is my mother tongue I can tell you that, yes, 'Kaiser' means Emperor, but no-one would consider that a valid first name in any german speaking country. Or 'Bing' (apparently menaing: 'kettle-shaped hollow' - no such thing!) is not a name (or word) I have ever seen in a german speaking country either. Other words such as 'Clovis', are hardly even German, but apparently mean 'Famous Soldier'! Never heard of it.
All this undermines the purpose of the book and I suggest that if you like a name from THIS book, go and double-check it and its meaning (and that it is, in fact, used as a name in the first place - if this is important to you) in ANOTHER book!! Sorry...

Best book of names I've found
I am not having a baby- I'm just interested in names, so I got a couple of these 'baby names' books and this one was by far the best. It has all the names first by which country they come from, then alphabetically, and includes a very comprehensive passage of the origin and meaning of each name.