Unique names will make children stand out, but sometimes, the results can be more baffling than distinctive, which is probably not the desired effect of a unique moniker.
A healthcare worker recently shared a TikTok video detailing some of the most ‘wildest’ baby names she’s encountered in her line of work.
Alystina, who posts under the handle @zerohourliving, revealed that some of these names were so unusual that she and her colleagues struggled to pronounce them.
She noted that these unconventional names were particularly common among “young people”. One such example was ABCDE – pronounced ‘Ab-Suh-Dee’ – which she quipped was the parents’ way of “keeping things really easy for that child”.
Another name that caught her off guard was Le-a, which she initially assumed was pronounced ‘Leah’. However, she soon discovered that the hyphen was meant to be read as ‘dash’, making the correct pronunciation ‘Ledasha’.
Alystina also recounted a recent incident where a girl named CVIIILYN came into the emergency room. She assumed the name would be pronounced ‘Civilian’, but was surprised when the girl corrected her, stating her name was actually ‘Caitlin’.
“She then proceeded to tell everybody that she was pretty unimpressed and that the VIII in her name was actually Roman numerals, so that was an eight. So her name was Caitlin.”
However, Alystina recounted the most shocking instance involving a “young child in the paediatric room,” whose name she described as “absolutely crazy”.
She revealed: “The parents of this child had named this child – I don’t even know how they’re allowed to register this – it was S, H, I, hyphen, T, H, E, A, D. And it was pronounced Shatheed. But they had essentially named their child s***head.”
Despite the potential for this unusual name to lead to bullying, the parents found it “thought it was hysterical” when explaining it to her.