The New Baby-Name Anxiety - NYTimes.com "Amory" was too F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Enzo" too Europhilic. "Selby" was too Brooklyn, "Roman" too Polanski. And those are just the boy names, a few of the dozens my wife, Joanna, and I have considered in our search to find a name for our baby, due next month. What's in a name? What isn't, these days? Baby naming has become an industry - with paid consultants, books, Web sites brimming with trend data, and academic studies exploring correlations between baby names and future success. The once-simple task of coming up with a monogram for the baby blanket has evolved into a high-stakes exercise in personal "branding." And so many prospective parents feel paralyzed, trying to find the elusive name that is exotic yet not bizarre, classic yet not pompous, on trend but not trendy. "All this evaluation is not just overwhelming, it's contagious," said Page Rockwell, 34, a freelance project manager in San Francisco. Before she gave birth to a daughter a year ago, friends were constantly weighing in with half-welcome advice: "Charlotte" and "Chloe," for example, were beautiful, but a bit played out. She shuddered when friends passed around birth announcement e-mails from mutual acquaintances amended with catty comments like "worst name ever." Ms. Rockwell compiled spreadsheets filled with notations on government trend data ("Olivia," an early favorite, was spiking ominously, she found), tabloid favorites ("Penelope" was rejected when Kourtney Kardashian claimed it); and cultural nuances (was it good that "Rosamund" evolved from "horse protector" in German?). She and her husband eventually settled on "Imogen," a name with pleasing literary overtones (Shakespeare's "Cymbeline"): distinctive, but not weird, they thought. Not long ago, unusual baby names were largely the province of celebrities - who can forget the rolled eyes that greeted "Apple" (Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin's daughter) or "Moxie CrimeFighter" (Penn Jillette's daughter). Now, ordinary mortals are getting into the act. The Social Security Administration's list of the most popular baby names in the United States for 2012, released last month, showed a continued slide for staples like "John" (now No. 28) and "Mary" (123), which were among the Top 5 for a big chunk of the 20th century; the biggest gainers were "Major" (483 from 988) and "Arya" (413 from 711). "Finding a name that has authentic roots, but is completely undiscovered, is the ultimate baby name status symbol," said Pamela Redmond Satran, a founder of the site Nameberry and an author of a new e-book called "The Nameberry Guide to Off-the-Grid Baby Names." Even when parents look to the Bible, they often thumb past "Adam" and "Daniel" in favor of "Joah" or "Obadiah," she said. In 2002, 77 percent of babies born in the United States had names on the Top 1000, according to government data. By 2011, only 73 percent did. Keep in mind that "Maxton," "Krish" and "Brecken" already were on the Top 1000. To get more obscure than those, you basically have to draw Scrabble tiles randomly, which is perhaps how parents come up with neologisms like "Cree," "Izan" and "Emi" (for boys) and "Safi," "Nanou" and "Esosa" (for girls), all of which cropped up for the first time last year among the 450,000 births to registered users of BabyCenter. "No one wants their kid to be one of 15 Aidens in the kindergarten class," said Linda Murray, the site's editor in chief. Looking beyond the Top 1000 was not enough for Jenn Lewis-Gordon, a waitress in Lakewood, N.J. She and her husband crossed off any name that had been used more than 100 times in the entire country in the last year. This left "Ptolemy," "Bombay," "Thursday" and "Ocean," as well as "Atlas," their ultimate choice. "I feel as though he'll be less likely to be a follower if he starts out from the beginning being different," Ms. Lewis-Gordon, 35, explained. Blame the glut of information online for this. How many hours have I lost scrolling through lists of Zen names, names from fashion, names from "Twilight" on sites like BabyNames.com or The Baby Name Wizard? "Jonas," it seems, is big in Austria. Hmm. "Olav" is trending in Iceland. Even confining my search to countries where Joanna and I can claim genetic citizenship (England, Wales, Scotland, Germany), I muddled our thinking with intriguing impossibilities like "Caerwyn," "Cosmo" and "Daxton." It does not help to know that even if you unearth the perfect curio, it won't remain yours alone for long. As with great, undiscovered taquerias, word about the latest hot underground names spreads quickly, meaning trends in names rise and fall as quickly as hemlines. Three years ago, after we had our first child, Tobias, Joanna and I tacitly agreed on "Milo," should we have a second boy. Who had a child named Milo? In the ensuing years, however, the name started cropping up on "hipster name" lists online, and shot from 422 to 330. Suddenly, we know multiple miniature Milos. Friends of ours in Manhattan, Sharon and Rob Beesley, named their daughter "Ella," after Fitzgerald, in 2005. Within a few years, however, "Ella" was popping up on personalized bedsheets in the Pottery Barn catalog, and the Beesleys were reduced to claiming that their choice was a tribute to a grandmother (who had never used the name). Another friend, who works on Wall Street, is so conscious of overlap with other parents that he has broken down the list of possible names for his forthcoming baby into trader-speak categories like "momentum stock," "oversold" or a "value play." It was not always thus. My high school in Cupertino, Calif., in the 1980s was a sea of ethnically diverse Marks and Mikes and Karens and Michelles, all names that would have seemed at home on a rabbit-ears-era sitcom - my name, in fact, was inspired by Dr. Alex Stone, a character on "The Donna Reed Show." Then again, most families I knew growing up had three children, if not five or seven. Now, most urban professionals I know limit themselves to one or two, which perhaps adds to the pressure to make every name count. Many of us are also starting families at a later age, with perhaps more time to consider the potential long-term consequences of a child's name (thanks, "Freakonomics"). One friend struck "Kaydence" from her list when it failed the future-Supreme-Court-justice test. I thought about how my mother always said that naming her three children was relatively quick and painless. Then I thought about my parents" own names: Eugene, Joyce. Sure, plenty of young moderns have gone in for the conspicuously gas-lamp names "Ruby" and "Cyrus," but I don't know any mining the New Deal. So, late one night, I logged onto the Social Security site and began jotting ideas from the Top 100 of the 1930s. Talk about a mother lode. For boys, there were gems like "Howard," "Floyd," "Melvin," "Stanley" and "Earl"; for girls, "Betty," "Irene," "Ethel," "Norma" and "Phyllis." Half asleep, I e-mailed the list to Joanna. Her response the next morning: "Um, no." Our work continues.