Is Gaylord a suitable baby name for the UK?

Naming baby number 1 was a relatively easy business – a couple of years before L was born, friends of ours had a baby girl and we fell in love with the name they chose for her, and jokingly asked if we could steal it if we ever had a girl, they agreed and when L was born it was natural that she had that name. We had a boys name that we liked a lot too.

Since then we have moved from France to England and had fun with L’s name as it has an accent on it and is frequently mispronounced here, which has made choosing a name for baby number 2 that much harder.

As our surname is a very French one it would be weird to give our children very English-sounding names, but we need a name that won’t confuse the English, that they’ll be able to pronounce and that won’t cause the poor child to be teased at school. Not an easy task! We also want something that is not too common, but not too weird either.

B and I recently went on a babymooning holiday to have some couple time before baby number 2 arrives and I bought this book to take with us. I told B strictly before we went “we can’t come home until we’ve chosen our baby names!”

Well we had a funny evening or two leafing through the book, with B making suggestions such as Arthur (pronounced Ah-ture in French) and me liking Killian until I wrote it down and decided I didn’t like the idea of my child’s name starting with “kill”. But I think what made us laugh the most was the idea of naming our baby “Gaylord” which, although I’ve never come across it in France, was one of the suggested names in the book. I’m not sure any son of ours would appreciate being called Gaylord and then being put through the English school system!

We have now fortunately chosen our boy and girl names (we don’t want to know the baby’s sex) and are just waiting for them to grow on us….only 3 more months to go to see if they fit!