Popular names by postal code
What are the mostloved names in your area? Data provided to The Sun reveals the top choices by neighbourhood, including a few surprises
I t’s the list no parent wants their child’s name to top. When it comes to naming babies in this day and age, originality is the gold standard. Just ask the parents of any Jaxon or Kai or Mya.
Or, bizarrely, parents of Ethans or Emmas, which were the top boy’s and girl’s names in B.C. between 2003 and 2013.
“We had no idea that those were the top names,” said Burnaby dad Chad Leaman, who has two-year-old twins named Ethan and Emma. “We knew zero Emmas and zero Ethans, so we thought they were unique and special snowflakes, but it turns out that great minds are thinking alike.”
Now that the twins have started toddler classes, Leaman said that even in a group of a dozen children, his kids always need a last initial on their name tag because there is always more than one.
Top names by area
At The Vancouver Sun’s request, B.C.’s Vital Statistics Agency provided a breakdown of the most popular boy’s and girl’s names by postal code area. There are about 190 of these regions in B.C., corresponding to the first three digits of the postal code.
An interactive online map — showing the most popular boy’s and girl’s names for each area — can be found at vancouversun.com. The map also allows you to drill down and see a list of the most popular names in your neighbourhood.
The maps are based on the total number of babies born with each name from 2003 to 2013 combined, using the address provided for each baby’s mother on her birth certificate.
For privacy reasons, the agency only provided data on a name if at least five boys, or five girls, were born with that name. As a result, data is not available for a small number of areas.
Not surprisingly, Ethan and Emma show up a lot on the maps.
Ethan is the top boy’s name in more than a quarter of the province’s postal code areas: 51. And Emma is the top girl’s name in 41 of them.
But parents aren’t choosing those names because they’re the most common. If anything, they’re choosing the names despite it.
“We knew it was really popular, but we picked it anyway,” said Rhonda Karaboitis, who has three-year-old twins named Ethan and Sophia, the fourth most popular name for girls. “(Ethan) was really the only name my husband and I agreed on.”
Asked why she picked Ethan, the most popular name for boys in her Coquitlam neighbourhood, Karaboitis paused for a moment and said: “You know what it was? It was years ago seeing that Ethan Allen furniture store on United Boulevard ... well, before I was even pregnant, and I just loved the name Ethan.”
Baby Sophia was named by her older sister, who loved the character by the same name in the movie Mamma Mia.
As for Leaman, he and his wife knew they were having twins and he said they chose Emma early on for the girl’s name. They wanted a boy’s name that started with the same letter.
“The ‘E’ names for boys are kind of limited. I didn’t want to have an Eduardo or an Edgar,” he said.
Coquitlam resident Herman Lee said he named his son Ethan in part so he wouldn’t be made fun of at school.
Lee said his own name was “not a very common name and not a very ... cool name. I just wanted something different that would give him a little more of a head start,” he said. “My name defined who I was and it made me a stronger person. I kept hearing: ‘Herman the German’ or ‘Herman Munster’ all the time.”
A few surprises
But in most areas, another name is most popular. And there are some interesting regional patterns in what parents choose to name their children.
For example, Matthew is the most popular boy’s name in the southwest corner of Vancouver (V6S, V6N and V6P) while Olivia is popular along the Cambie corridor (V5Z, V5Y, V5V) and in South Surrey (V4A, V4P).
There are also some interesting outliers: Names that don’t crack the Top 10 provincewide, but which are the most popular of all in certain neighbourhoods. For example:
Brooklyn is the top girl’s name in the V2W area of Maple Ridge.
Sophie is the top girl’s name in West Vancouver’s V7T.
Samuel is the top boy’s name in East Vancouver’s V5N.
Noah is the top boy’s name in Tsawwassen (V4L).
Perhaps the most striking pattern in the data, though, is the naming practices in North Surrey’s heavily Indo- Canadian neighbourhoods of V3V and V3W.
Armaan is the most popular boy’s name in both areas, while Harleen is the top girl’s name in V3V and Gurleen the top girl’s name in V3W.
And Indo-Canadian names aren’t just number 1: they dominate the entire list.
In V3W, for example, the most popular girl’s names after Gurleen are, in order: Harleen, Jasleen, Simran, Avneet, Harnoor and Mannat. Only then, in eighth spot, do you find Emma.
The dominance is slightly less dramatic for boys’ names.