Science says these are the most beautiful sounding baby names

Being Pregnant – 04 Nov 22 By Rebel Wylie

A study in linguistics has determined which of the world’s most popular baby names sound the most beautiful when spoken aloud.

If you’ve ever had to choose a baby name, you’ll know that finding inspiration is just the beginning. Once you’ve narrowed down your list of favourites, it will all come down to the one which sound best to your ears.

Now science has helped out a little by taking the guess work out of finding the baby names that sound the sweetest!

A recent study, conducted in part by Dr Bodo Winter, Associate Professor of Cognitive Linguistics at the University of Birmingham analysed hundreds of popular baby names to reveal the most beautiful sounding names from both the UK and the US.

By using phonetics, which studies the sounds, patterns and structures of the human language, the researchers scored popular names based on how much emotion they evoked when spoken aloud.

How does science determine what sounds good?

Of course, a name sounding great isn’t the only factor that parents will consider when choosing a name. Cultural influences, gender and family history, celebrity trends and more also play a role, but if they don;t sound great, they probably won’t make the cut.

Dr Winter began his research by building from a 2018 study published by The University of Warwick, which analysed words to determine which ones spark emotions.

“Using an exciting piece of sound symbolism research from Adelman et al. (2018) as a starting point, we scored a number of the world’s most popular baby names in order to rank them,” said the linguistics expert.

“The names that ranked the most highly, provoked the most positive emotions when spoken out loud and therefore are likely to sound most beautiful to the human ear.”

Read on to see how the most popular names ranked according to how pleasant they sound below.