I’ve always found etymology so intriguing. It was something I was interested in in college and university and when it came to name our children I found a whole new world of etymology. Where names come from and what they mean became quite important to me.
I’ve always found etymology so intriguing. It was something I was interested in in college and university and when it came to name our children I found a whole new world of etymology. Where names come from and what they mean became quite important to me. I put up one of those ‘ask me anything’ posts in my instagram stories 2 weeks back and although I havent actually gotten around to answering any, one question came up a few times. And it’s an answer I am keen to share!
Where did Ebben’s name come from??
Naming a kid is hard! Like really hard! Your making a decision that is gonna stay with them the rest of their life (…and after!) So it’s a pretty important decision. It can effect them as they grow up, and even sometimes determine how people treat them or perceive them to be even before meeting them. Sad but honestly true! We all do it, sometimes certain names trigger memories or connotations in our minds of other people we have met with such names, or people in the media it might link to.
Now me and Jon aren’t fans of popular names (sorry its just a personal thing!!), photographing newborns and kids means we hear all the baby name trends as they come and go. I like slightly more unusual names, whereas jon likes uncommon but not too weird. So we have had to find a happy medium. Elian was actually a name we heard after photographing a newborn, and it has welsh heritage (a Merlin-esque character in welsh mythology) which we hadn’t been looking for at the time but did like the idea. It’s pretty unusual in the UK still. With just 17 being registered in 2016 when Elian was born (yes I look up name statistics, obsessively when we are looking at names!) and it hasn’t been any higher since.
We quite easily had a little list of girls names at the start of both pregnancies. But boys names we struggle with. Finding out number 2 was a boy threw us again, and the hunt began. I liked the idea of another name with welsh or at least celtic heritage so started there. After weeks of searching and testing out ideas, the only one that had made the list was Tarran (meaning thunder). We found that boys welsh names are often very harsh sounding, they just don’t flow particularly well and the 1 or 2 we even liked the sound of were the ones that were already popular.
Then one night Jon was working and I watched The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society movie, which is based on a true story. One of the lead characters was called Eben (single B) I instantly loved the name and luckily Jon did too! We hadnt planned to have another E name but now it seemed fitting. Having looked at 1000’s of names finding 1 one both agreed on is hard!
And so my googling began! I found Eben was both Hebrew and Celtic! yay! While searching I also found the Ebben variation, which we rathered…5 letters just like Elian, and I thought it was more logical to say phonetically. Ebb-en, rather than a harsher E-Ben.
Finding a meaning was hard as the double B version was more often referred to as a surname but I did find that Ebben means Stone of God (Elian means God is Family) so that resonated nicely with me also.
So time for my last check…popularity. I was pretty certain I was safe on this front as I had never heard it before and neither had Jon or our closest friends…and happily not 1 child was registered in the UK in the last 3 years at least! Yay!! It was popular back in 1880 and the character in the movie was an elderly man in 1940, so I was pretty sure it was a name that had simply died out. With the popularity of old names at the moment I’m glad it wasn’t one that had made a come back.
So it quickly became top of our list and after just 2 weeks of us toying with it, that was it, we were settled. It went well with Arthur our chosen middle name after my grandfather (Gerald Arthur…but I wasn’t keen on Gerald) It worked with Elian obviously, thats something else you have to consider, with one child having a family unusual name the other needs it too (and people kinda expected it of me!). It was just simple and perfect, unique but not at all weird. We were…and still are…totally in love with his name. And he very much suited Ebben when he was born. We’d been calling the bump Ebben for at least the last 6-8 weeks of my pregnancy, our family had been let in on the name, as had our closest friends, and more importantly for us Elian could say it, and had called the bump it also.
But now it feels so bittersweet that he is the only registered Ebben in years but sadly he was also registered as died the very same day. I know that we will personally use his name and he will be remembered and spoken about often by our friends, but it’ll never be used in school, on a marriage certificate, university diploma or on a job application, I won’t be calling it in a playground or yelling it in my house, and that makes me sad. It’ll never have the impact on the world we hoped it would, granted it’ll still have an impact, because we will make sure it does, with our #StarsforEbben fundraiser and anything else we do in his honour.
Finding the perfect name for any future rainbow siblings is going to be such a challenge as we have set the bar so high with both our boys names! Wish us luck! lol!