Happy Middle Name Pride Day!

You might not know it but today is “Middle Name Pride Day” – a day for taking all of those middle names that are usually hidden away on forms and official bits of paperwork and bringing them out into the daylight for a big old celebration!

Middle names are often used for “special” names, for example, to honour family members and relatives, to celebrate important things in a family’s life (such as important places, months, or ideals), or simply to have some fun with a slightly “out there” name – that can be used or hidden away depending on whether or not the child finds the name exceptionally good or exceptionally embarrassing later in life.

For most people, their middle name is actually a big part of what makes them “unique” – while you might share your first name with a lot of people, the combination of your first name and middle name can feel much more uniquely “you”.

So, we’ve taken a look at our past orders to have a bit of an investigation into the middle names chosen by our customers…

For girls, the runaway success has to be “Rose”, which was our most popular middle name by far – followed (at a slight distance) by “May/Mae/Mai”. For boys, “J names” proved most popular, with “James” and “John” taking the two top spots.

While traditional names were the most popular choices for middle names, we also found that plenty of parents had decided to get a bit more creative with their middle names, with inspiration coming from all kinds of sources, including animals, nature, myths and legends, and a few pop culture icons as well. Some of our favourites include:

Artemis, Astrid, Belle, Blue, Bluebell, Clover, Cruz, Fox, Harper, Hunter, Star, Storm, Tinkerbell, Valentine, Xena, Wren, Zen, Zephyr, Zigi.

While we don’t get to see all of the middle names that our customers have chosen, we do get a fair amount of initials, and we found a few surprises in our order history:

• “J” is the most popular letter by far, followed by “A”, “M”, “E”, “L”, and “R”.
• Least popular is “U”, which had a very unfortunate year in 2016 and appeared in absolutely no orders as a middle initial, followed by “Q”, “Y”, “X”, and “V”, while “Z” proved to be our most popular “unpopular” letter.
• Girls were most likely to have middle names starting with “R” or “M”, while boys were most likely to have “J” or “A”.
• While “Q”, “U”, “X”, and “Y” names were all as equally (unpopular) with our customers for boys and girls, “Z” and “C” names had equal popularity.
• The biggest gaps were between the letters “G”, “I”, and “M” (which were much more popular for girls than boys) and “D”, “H”, and “W” (which were much more popular for boys than girls).

Did You Know: we run a Fundraising Scheme for schools, PTAs, and other activity/youth groups and clubs to allow them to raise money by earning commission on sales of Stikins ® name labels. Schools and groups can earn up to 30% commission on orders of name labels, which they can then put towards any ongoing fundraising goals and projects. There’s no membership fee to pay and no ongoing costs; simply fill in our one-stop registration form to start fundraising all year round!

We’ve just given our Fundraising pages a bit of a makeover to make them even better and easier to use. To take a look and find out more, simply head on over to our Fundraising Home Page today! For more information about our name labels, speak to one of our team today or visit our FAQs page.