Trends, origin guides, and inspiration for naming your baby.
The face has finished its main work by now. Features are recognizable on ultrasound, hearing is settled, and the baby is starting to look less like a fetus and more like a baby.
Liam, Lily, Luca, Layla, Luna. The liquid L is the consonant that travels best across languages, and the names that lead with it share a softness that other consonants cannot reach.
Taste buds come online this week. The baby is, in a literal sense, tasting what you ate yesterday — sweet, bitter, garlicky, salty — and the preferences set now stick.
Halfway. The fundal tape measure starts matching the gestational week, vernix coats the skin, and the calendar finally tilts toward the second half. Eight names for the midpoint.
Maeve, Cole, June, Wren. They look like one syllable on the page. They take longer to say than that. The diphthong stretches them, and the stretch is what makes them feel bigger than their length.
Hair sprouts this week, both on the scalp and as vernix forming on the skin. The body is laying down its outer layer; eggs are settling in the ovaries; the brain is organizing itself.
The anatomy scan window opens this week. The scan is the most detailed look of the pregnancy and one of the few moments that often comes with new information about the baby.
James. Elizabeth. Eleanor. William. A handful of names have stayed in the US top 200 for over a hundred years. The rest of the chart churned. What do these names share that the disappeared ones do not?
Fat forms under the skin this week, the cord thickens, and the translucent look of earlier ultrasounds starts to fill in. Eight names for the filling-out week.
Quickening — the first felt movements — can start this week. For many parents this is the week the pregnancy stops being theoretical and becomes physical.
Hearing begins this week. The baby is starting to record the soundscape outside, the small joints take their final hardness, and the cord between you thickens.
The spleen starts producing red blood cells this week, the face gains muscle control, and the second trimester settles into its more comfortable middle phase.
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