Des Ryan, Linguist and Language Engineer for Apple's Siri, joined Drivetime on RTÉ Radio 1 to discuss the world's most beautiful names. Listen back above.
Linguistic scientists have complied a list of the top 20 most beautiful sounding names. The list contains many popular names, including a few Irish ones, but how exactly did they do it?
Conducted by Dr. Bodo Winter, Associate Professor of Cognitive Linguistics at the University of Birmingham, and sponsored by baby gift brand My 1st Years, the research took a list of common names from across the United Kingdom and United States and ranked them by how "nice" they sounded.
How does one rank how "nice" a word sounds? Well, according to Des Ryan, Dr. Winter based his study on previous research that looked at the most beautiful sounding words across a variety of languages, and simply applied those metrics to names rather than words.
While beauty is famously in the eye (or should we say, ear) of the beholder, Des insists that some sounds rank highly across the board. For example, a number of girls' names overlap in popularity from across the UK and US, thanks to some pretty vowels.
"Sophia, Zoe, Rosie - these all have an 'o' and an 'e' sound in them, and that seems to score very highly according to the metrics," he explains.
When it comes to the boys names, presenter Sarah McInerney becomes sceptical of the study, pointing out that Zayn is likely the post popular name for boys because of a certain pop star rather than how beautiful it sounds.
"It's a chicken and egg kind of a thing," argues Des. "A name gets into the system, becomes popularised by a famous person, and then everyone knows the name, and then everyone begins to like the name, and then everyone's at it. Then, suddenly, there's too many people at it and the name falls from grace and that's the end of that name for a while."
"There's a combination," he continues, "one is that the trends come and go for the names, and the other, I suppose, is that there are some patterns which tend to recur."
The full list of top ten sounding baby names 2022
Girls
- Sophia
- Zoe
- Rosie
- Sophie
- Ivy
- Phoebe
- Violet
- Willow
- Hannah
- Ellie
Boys
- Zayn
- Jesse
- Charlie
- Louie
- William
- Freddie
- George
- Ali
- Daniel
- Riley
