Zalco - my brother born in 1954 was named "Kim"

I had a cousin Seconda. She was the second daughter. I had a friend named Prudence. I think she hated her name.

Zalco, I knew a guy whose first and middle names were Kim Leslie.

Elmer, that song would never fly today, would it!

We had a relative named Eldine. Her father was Elda and her mother was Bernadine.

You're right nickel.

To me, it's very sad and disgusting that that kind of stuff and a whole lot more, and a whole lot worse, as regards Native Americans and a many, many others, was ever okay.

Wilfreda Cinderella was my mother’s name. She didn’t much like it.

I knew a couple who had triplets, 2 boys and a girl, they were named Hunter, Blade and Pierce.

I met a young girl who’s name is Wheels. I asked if that was her real name and she said yes, I have hippie parents.

as for myself, I have a different name. I have never met another person with my name and my name gets mispronounce all the time.

i worked with a man named Esper.

I kept looking at this thread title with some name niggling in the back of my mind to post but couldn't bring it forward. Then tonight, I remembered. We used to live for a while in a tiny, tiny farming community in a mostly rural county in WA. Lots of dairy farms, Dutch people and Scandinavians.There was a man in the town named Odd. So I propose that his was the oddest name of all:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_(name)

Most certainly pronounced in a way resembling "owed" or something similar.

It was pronounce Odd, just like it looks, but probably an Americanization of the original pronunciation. Wikipedia says it's the 11th most common name in Norway!

With your added info, this is how I would describe it - it's a homonym with the English word odd when it's mispronounced/Americanized.

Funny thing is, Americans tend to do that while Europeans tend to try to pronounce foreign language words and names with some effort to approximate how they're pronounced in the language they originate from.

Simple example - an American sees the name D'Angelo and says Dee Angelo. In Italian, it's Dangelo (just add a "d" sound and follow it with "angelo") and most Europeans would say that too. Too many similar examples to cite.

My grandmother's name was Minnie. Not a nickname.

when I was teaching, I had a student whose last name was River and first name was Awatooki.

Best name I ever encountered when answering the phone at work was a foreign sounding gentleman called Fanny Bandana. I’ll never forget it because of the immense struggle not to laugh, especially given the meaning of his first name in the U.K.

It wasn’t helped by my snorting colleagues who cottoned on to my disbelief when I was compelled to repeat his name out loud and spell it out to me.

It was actually spelt Phani but it still remains a top moment of work hilarity for me.

Other odd names include my Aunt Blanche, and a couple I know who named their first daughter Heavenly.

Oh and some neighbours who recently named their daughter Myrtle.

I knew a boy whose hippie parents named him Huckleberry and another boy (different family) named Green Hickory.

The clerk at my pharmacy named her daughter - Nevaeh - which she explained is Heaven spelled backwards.

My neighbor told me that she has a friend who recently had a son named Kermit.

A buddy of mine went to school in the south and knew someone whose first name was General and his last name was Washington.

Maire, my mother had a cousin Kermit, but he was born a hundred years ago!

lily, my grandmother's names were Wilhelmina and Gertrude, nicknames were Minnie and Gert.

A Texas born girl, 'Jamie' was formally named:

Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshen

kescianneshaimondrischlyndasaccarnae

renquellenendrasamecashaunettethalem

eicoleshiwhalhinive'onchellecaundenesh

eaalausondrilynnejeanetrimyranaekuesa

undrilynnezekeriakenvaunetradevonneya

vondalatarneskcaevontaepreonkeinesce

ellaviavelzadawnefriendsettajessicanneles

ciajoyvaelloydietteyvettesparklenescea

undrieaquenttaekatilyaevea'shauwneorali

aevaekizzieshiyjuanewandaleccianneren

eitheliapreciousnesceverroneccalovelia

tyronevekacarrionnehenriettaescecleon

patrarutheliacharsalynnmeokcamonaeloies

alynnecsiannemerciadellesciaustillaparis

salondonveshadenequamonecaalexetiozetia

quaniaenglaundneshiafrancethosharomeshaun

nehawaineakowethauandavernellchishankcarl

inaaddoneillesciachristondrafawndrealaot

relleoctavionnemiariasarahtashabnequcka

gailenaxeteshiataharadaponsadeloriakoent

escacraigneckadellanierstellavonnemyiat

angoneshiadianacorvettinagodtawndrashirl

enescekilokoneyasharrontannamyantoniaaquin

ettesequioadaurilessiaquatandamerceddiamae

bellecescajamesauwnneltomecapolotyoajohny

aetheodoradilcyana

Koyaanisqatsiuthawyhaiashieakhauwnne

Williams.

Why??

I see Koyaanisqatsi at the end, and it definitely feels like that movie.

My mother hated her middle name: Lenore.

My aunt was named Exhilda.

I named my baby doll Thankful.

Yayagal, I named my doll Lawnmower. I thought it was such a beautiful name!

As to foreign translations, I had a friend whose family moved to the US from China and took new names. His brother chose the name James. My friend took the name Jimmy. They didn't realize it was the same name.

My mom knew a woman named after her father. He was Clyde; she was Clydice. Unfortunately, it was pronounced like Colitis.

A bit of a tangent but in the category of foreign mispronunciations, going in the other direction:

I find the name of this website and the company peculiar. If I were looking to come up with a name that was a riff on "house" but extended in length, I'd probably have gone in the direction of "howsss".

Instead, this site is Houzz which to me phonetically would sound like "whose".

I believe the founders of the company are not English mother tongue people and I wonder if they chose the name?

Well, “ou” can be pronounced different ways — oo, ow, oh, uh — and sometimes pronounced in the same word by different people, like “route” (or even by the same person. I pronounce route differently in different circumstances). So “Houzz“ almost picks up on the idea of variety, depending on use.

I always thought Houzz was a clever name for this site; the zz's are especially apt because sometimes it's a real snoozze-fest.

I've worked in HR pretty much my entire working career. I've worked with people all over the globe. While I've run into some interesting names, I can't recall any I felt "odd". I recognized early in life that names are important. I was given an unusual first name that was consistently mispronounced so I make it a point of trying to say names properly.

There are several names I've come across in my years that muse me greatly and have stayed with me for many, many years. I won't share them because they are real names.

Many of the names people are mentioning were very common and popular 75-100 years ago.

Less common or popular were two of my ancestors' names: Littleberry and Action

My mother was friends with a couple who were called Peaches and Branch; they named their son Shrub (was it because they were Texans?)

bpath, fine. I see an immediate "ooze" sound when I see it but if you think it's uncertain, I'll go with that.

If what was intended was a name with a connotation to homes, spelling it out with an ambiguous outcome, the pronunciation of which is unclear, violates an unwritten rule of product and company naming. Namely, It should be clear and obvious.

Tarantula

She totally didn't mind

my DM birth name was Igenio. When she was about 6 or 8 i think her Uncle and Aunt came to visit and told her parents that they should give her a more Americanized name. They legally changed it to Eugenia. I don't know it that was any better. When we had ab exchange student from Mexico stay with us for a few weeks one summer his mom's name was also Eugenia. When she needed a passport in the seventies to go to Europe on a tour, she had a hard time getting one because she had changed her name. Her mothers name was Leocadia. I don't know if she legally changed it to Leona but that is what she was known by. My name is a combination of my parents name.

"His father has Norse in his ancestry"

Not to be too pedantic but does he speak Norwegian? If not, the ancestry isn't really relevant at all for his pronunciation, is it?

elmer!

Since when is an Americanized version better than the correct pronunciation?

I was saying the opposite.

Apologies. Totally did not get that out of what you said???

I’m thinking that even if one doesn’t speak the old tongue, there are things that travel down through the generations that are not biologicical, but things that are heard or seen. I can’t imagine an Aunt Karen, but rather Tante Karen (pronounced kahren) because that‘s what I have always heard. Just as, when I hear the name “Augie”, I “see” “Aage”, because I had an Uncle Aage, pronounced similarly.

I had an uncle whose middle name was Eleven. He was the eleventh and last birth in my mother's family. There were 10 live siblings in her family. One died either at or shortly after birth. Five of them married in the same year, 1913.

A friend of mine had an uncle they called LD...his real name was Lovey Dovey.

Our son had a classmate named Blu Gray.

On a trip to town, the newest ppl on one of the lakes was named Art Work

I now know of a little lady recently born to a young family named River Zen.

I just heard on the radio that 'natural' names are popular now, such as Juniper, Rain, Sage.

I worked with a woman named Justapearl

I am thoroughly enjoying this thread. So far the memorable ones for me are Chlorine and Justapearl. Not to put down any of the other stellar contributions.

When I was in the second grade, we had a boy named "Extry". I know he was from a large family but often wondered how he felt about his name.

Grandmother was Agnes and mom was Gertrude.

A former roommate had a co-worker who named her daughter, well, it's a Latin word for a part of female genitalia. No, this was not an episode of Seinfeld. It had to do with "lips." The woman clearly had no idea what she had done. My roommate had a hard time keeping her mouth shut; it was after the fact, so it wouldn't have mattered. That poor girl! I hope I don't get banned for this.

I had a classmate named Giselbert, and his sister’s name was Edeltraut. Great names, if you were born in the 18th century. :)

sealavender, when you change languages or change cultures, words and names can take on different meanings.

There a word that's perfectly polite in the US that begins with F that's a synonym for a person's bottom or tush. As in, I slipped and fell on my f______ . That same word is a name that I don't think is as popular as it was many years ago, F Brice was an American entertainer that the play and movie Funny Girl were based on.

That same word in the UK is a crude, impolite term to refer to female genitalia. Same language, different cultures.