Sorry for another quick review. One day my life will shift out of crisis mode.I've used The Baby Name Wizard as a writing resource for years. It's not the usual name dictionary that gives a name, alternate spellings, and the traditional meaning. Instead, there's a huge amount of information for each name, stuff not available anywhere else.
For instance, I just turned to the name Terry in the Girls' Names section. It tells me the name was the 97th most popular in the 1950s but is rather rare today (there's a little chart with that information for each name). It gives me the pronunciation, spelling variants, and gives a short list of "sister" and "brother" names--names that are stylistically similar. There's also a short paragraph about the name itself.
The Sister and Brother lists are incredibly useful, incidentally. If I have a character named Terry but I want to rename her, I can look at the sister names and make a choice from Jackie, Lynn, Sheryl, Connie, or Trudy. If I want to give Terry a brother, I can choose from Rick, Garry, Danny, Steve, or Bruce. That keeps the same feel of my original Terry while giving me a lot to choose from.
There are also a bunch of lists in the second half of the book, everything from Nordic names to Literary and Artistic, from Timeless names to Saints. It's useful for a writer, and I suppose it's probably also useful for parents-to-be.
B&N link
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